마크 스톨러는 AI 문제의 본질이 새로운 규제 부재가 아니라 기존 법률이 강자에게 집행되지 않는 것이라고 주장한다. 내부 문서에 따르면 마이크로소프트 임원은 AI를 '인류 역사상 가장 큰 노동 절도'라고 불렀으며, FTC의 엔비디아-ARM 합병 차단 등 기존 집행 노력이 트럼프 행정부 들어 축소되었다고 지적한다. 새로운 'AI용 FDA'식 규제보다 강자에 대한 법 집행이 먼저라는 것이 핵심 논지다.
번역된 본문
AI는 엘리트들의 범죄 행각이다. 문서에 따르면 마이크로소프트 임원이 AI를 '인류 역사상 가장 큰 노동 절도'라고 불렀다. 새로운 AI 규제는 핵심을 벗어난다. 문제는 기존 법률을 강자에게 적용하지 않는다는 것이다. 맷 스톨러, 2026년 9월 18일.
지난 몇 주간, 인공지능의 위험한 결과에 대한 공포가 엘리트 언론과 정치권을 휩쓸었다. 이런 광경은 코로나19 사태 이후 처음이며, 그 이전으로는 2008년 금융위기, 이라크 전쟁 전 논쟁기, 9·11 직후 몇 달이 있었다. 두려움은 짙고 실재한다. 그리고 모든 진영에서 나오는 하나의 확고한 요구는 '이 기술을 반드시 규제해야 한다'는 것이다.
가장 흔한 해법은 미국 식품의약국(FDA)과 유사한 형태의 안전 기준을 대형 언어 모델에 부과하는 것이다. 전 국회의원 후보 알렉스 보레스가 이런 입장으로, 몇 달 만에 3천만 달러를 모아 이를 둘러싼 정치 조직을 출범시켰다. 버니 샌더스도 같은 입장이며, Anthropic, OpenAI, 구글도 유사한 것을 추구하고 있다. 다른 이들은 문제를 대형 은행에 비유하며 은행 감독 체계 같은 것을 요구한다. 일부는 AI 개발 전면 중단을 원한다. 이러한 아이디어 대부분은 모호하고 때로는 실행 불가능하며 정의되지 않은 용어를 담고 있다. 하지만 다양한 아이디어를 갖는 것 자체는 잘못이 아니다.
그럼에도 이 상황에는 매우 기묘한 점이 있다. 우리에게는 이미 산업 관행을 살필 권한을 가진 연방 및 주 차원의 규제기관들이 있다. 개인 시민과 기업이 소송을 제기할 수 있는 사인 소송권도 있고, 실제로 그렇게 하고 있다. 또한 대형 AI 기업들이 저지르는 유해한 행위 대부분을 이미 금지하는 수많은 법률도 존재한다. 하지만 그 법들은 의미 있는 차이를 만들 만큼 충분히 집행되지 않고 있는데, 미국에서는 단순히 강자에게 법을 집행하지 않기 때문이다. 새로운 법이든 'AI용 FDA'든, 심지어 기술 개발 중단이든 결국 다르게 끝날 이유가 있는지 불분명하다.
그 이유를 이해하려면 AI 규제 시도와 그것이 성과를 내지 못한 이유부터 살펴보자. 요컨대 바이든 행정부 시절 집행기관들, 특히 FTC(연방거래위원회)의 리나 칸은 실제로 AI 안전 우려에 대응하고 있었다. 법무부 반독점국과 FTC는 역량을 강화하기 위해 다수의 기술 전문가를 영입했다. 여러분은 아마 이러한 조치를 접하지 못했을 텐데, 조 바이든이 이를 홍보하거나 알리지 않았기 때문이다. 바이든 개인적으로 관심이 없었고 의회 민주당도 마찬가지였다. 관심이 있던 이들은 빅테크의 비위를 맞추려고 이를 조용히 묻어두었다. 그리고 법관들—법복을 입은 정치인들—은 대세를 읽고 빅테크 편을 드는 경향이 있었다.
그러다 2024년 트럼프가 선거에서 승리했고, 그의 행정부는 강자에 대한 법 집행 시도를 취소하고 되돌렸다.
구체적으로 들어가 보자. FTC가 취한 가장 중요하고 성공적인 조치는 단연 2021년 AI 칩 제조사 엔비디아와 ARM 간의 합병을 차단한 것이었다. 이로 인해 두 회사는 합병에 수반되는 번거로운 세력 다툼 대신 자기 사업에 집중할 수 있는 발판이 마련되었다. 오늘날 엔비디아는 좋든 나쁘든 시가총액 기준 세계 최대 기업이자 AI 혁명의 엔진이 되었다.
안전 문제와 직접 관련된 조치는 훨씬 더 많았다. OpenAI가 2022년 ChatGPT를 출시한 후 FTC는 AI 활용 실태를 조사하는 일련의 연구와 조사를 진행했다. 위원회는 수년간 조사해 온 빅테크 관련 업무를 기반으로 삼았다. 특히 주목할 만하게 2023년 FTC는 ChatGPT에 대한 조사를 개시하며 OpenAI의 안전 관행에 대해 매우 구체적인 질문을 던졌다. 그 외에도 FTC는 교차 소유权和 인수 채용(acquihire)에 대한 연구를 수행했고, AI를 기만적인 방식으로 사용하는 기업들에 대해 여러 차례 시정 명령을 내렸다.
AI Is an Elite Crime Spree Documents show a Microsoft exec called AI the "largest theft of labor in human history.” New AI regulations are besides the point, the problem is we don’t apply existing laws to the powerful. Matt Stoller Sep 18, 2026 167 14 35 Share Over the last few weeks, a panic over the possibility of dangerous consequences from artificial intelligence has swept through elite media and politics. I haven’t seen anything like this since the Covid moment, and before that the 2008 financial crisis, the pre-Iraq War debate period, and the few months after 9/11. The fear is thick, and real. And the one solid demand, seemingly from every quarter, is that We Must Regulate This Technology. The most common solution is to impose some form of safety standards, akin to the Food and Drug Administration, but for large language models. That’s something former Congressional candidate Alex Bores believes, and he’s raised $30 million in just a few months to launch a political organization around it. That’s where Bernie Sanders is, and Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are seeking something similar. Others analogize the problem to large banks, calling for a bank supervisory regime . Some want a total pause on any AI development. Many of these ideas are vague and sometimes not administrable, with undefined terms. But there’s nothing wrong with having a basket of ideas. That said, there’s something very weird about this whole situation. And that is, we already have a set of regulators at a Federal and state level with a mandate to look at industrial practices. There are private rights of action where individual citizens and companies can bring lawsuits, and they do. There are also numerous laws in place that already prohibit many of the harmful activities engaged in by the large AI firms. But those laws are mostly not being enforced sufficiently to make a meaningful difference, because in America, we simply do not enforce the law against the powerful. And it’s not clear to me why a new law, an FDA for AI, or even a pause on tech development, would wind up any different. To understand why, let’s start with the attempts to regulate AI and why they haven’t delivered. The short story is that under the Biden administration, enforcers, most notably Lina Khan at the FTC, were actually responding to safety concerns about AI. Both the Antitrust Division and the FTC brought in a host of technical experts to beef up their capacity. You probably didn’t hear about these moves, but that’s because Joe Biden did not promote or publicize them. Biden was personally uninterested, so were Congressional Democrats. Those that were interested sought to curry favor with big tech, and so kept it quiet. And judges, who are politicians in robes and saw the writing on the wall, tended to side with big tech. Then in 2024, Trump won the election, and his administration canceled and rolled back attempts to enforce the law against the powerful. Let’s get into specifics. By far the most important and successful action the FTC took was in 2021, when the commission blocked the merger between AI chipmaker Nvidia and Arm. That set the stage for the growth of both companies, who could focus on their lines of business instead of a cumbersome set of turf wars that accompany mergers. Today, for better or worse, Nvidia is the biggest company in the world by market capitalization, the engine of the AI revolution. There was a lot more that bears directly on safety questions. After OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, the Federal Trade Commission enacted a flurry of studies and investigations looking into the deployment of AI. The commission was building on its work on big tech, which it had been investigating for years. Most notably, in 2023, the FTC launched a probe into ChatGPT, asking very specific questions about OpenAI’s safety practices. There’s a lot more. The FTC did studies on cross-ownership and acquihires. It brought multiple orders against companies using AI in deceptive ways or building technologies designed to commit fraud. It did work on data breaches, on surveillance pricing , on big tech’s ability to launch new products using machine learning, and even held CEOs personally liable for bad cybersecurity practices. The FTC’s sister enforcers at the Antitrust Division brought multiple monopolization cases against Google, both of which came to involve AI. it also filed a complaint against United Health’s acquisition of Change, a case involving data and machine learning, and it did work on the use of algorithms for price-setting in meat-packing and rent-setting. So what happened? Well, despite these actions, Khan and Kanter had very little support from Congress. Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer’s daughters worked at Facebook and Amazon, and in 2022 he personally blocked antitrust legislation from coming to the floor of the Senate so as to raise more campaign money from big tech donors. Pelosi similarly wouldn’t allow big tech legislation to come to the floor in the House. When Trump got elected in 2024, the Trump-Vance FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson immediately moved to reverse most of what Khan did, and even tried to erase her entire record, scrubbing the FTC’s website of more than 300 blog posts involving AI. But it was much more than just symbolic, Ferguson took the unusual step of pardoning an AI offender by setting aside the penalty against, Rytr, an AI development firm, for marketing its AI tools as a way to falsify testimonials and reviews. As powerful white collar defense lawyers noted, Ferguson was “signalling a shift in how the Commission will approach AI enforcement.” He quietly closed a public comment docket on surveillance pricing, and he has presumably ended the investigation into ChatGPT. These moves are consistent with Trump’s “ AI Action Plan ,” which called for Ferguson to “review all FTC final orders, consent decrees and injunctions, and, where appropriate, seek to modify or set-aside any that unduly burden AI innovation.” It is also consistent with the Trump Antitrust Division’s approach to algorithmic price-fixing, which it basically endorsed by settling the RealPage and Agri-Stats meat price-fixing cases. Not enforcing the law against the powerful is pretty much administration policy. On Monday, Attorney General Todd Blanche announced explicitly that the Department of Justice lean strongly against litigating against AI companies. “The last administration spent countless prosecutors’ hours and money and effort and resources regulating whatever they chose to regulate,” Blanche said. “I think that there are some Justice Departments that like to do that and that’s not what we’re doing.” While there are partisan valences here, there has also been a broader elite consensus in the judiciary that trying to impose meaningful legal obligations on large technology and AI firms is ridiculous. In 2023, three important D.C. Circuit judges dismissed government anti-monopoly claims against Meta. They said the case was simply “ odd ,” as the very premise of litigating market power violations against an innovative high-tech enterprise was foolish. Last year, Judge Jeb Boasberg ruled that Meta was not a monopoly. Judge Amit Mehta ruled that though Google was an illegal monopoly, he would not impose any meaningful remedy. Then two days ago, Judge Leonie Brinkema unsealed her opinion in another Google case, writing in somewhat mean-spirited tones that yes, Google was an illegal monopoly, but she would impose no meaningful remedy. She even indicated there were simply no circumstances in which she could ever imagine breaking up a monopoly. Boasberg, Mehta, and Brinkema were all Democratic appointees. So why go through this history? Well, it’s because I am trying to show the problem is not a lack of AI regulation. We have AI regulation. The problem is there’s an elite consensus that the rule of law simply does not apply to the powerful. Take the law in an entirely different context. It is per se