Bessent compares AI chiefs calling for rules to Hannibal Lecter
Washington is done listening to the labs warn about themselves — the administration now answers doom headlines with a shrug, and Saturday brought the sharpest version yet from the Treasury Secretary.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the AI executives asking government to step in should just slow down instead. On The Axios Show Saturday, co-founder Mike Allen asked whether the doomsday fears now coming from lab leaders amount to "BS." Bessent allowed that "we have to be prepared for every occasion," then turned on the doomer camp: "this alarmism without solutions by some of the AI community, that's not leadership." Pressed on CEOs who are, in Allen's words, "basically screaming for regulation, warning of losing control of AI," Bessent's answer was blunt: "Well, then they should slow down. It's kind of like Hannibal Lecter: stop me before I kill again."
That lands harder coming from Bessent than from a cable pundit: he is the Treasury Secretary who convened the nation's biggest banks for urgent talks over AI-driven cyber threats earlier this year, and who now argues the correct response to model risk is restraint by the builders, not guardrails from Washington. It arrives in the same week as Hinton, Bengio among 22 authors warning of an intelligence explosion, and it flips the burden onto the labs: if the executives mean their own warnings, prove it with a pause — if they don't, stop performing panic. Either way, the White House's "tremendous self-policing" strategy just got its most quotable defense, and any future push for binding AI rules now has to argue past a Silence of the Lambs punchline.
Elon Musk says SpaceX's AI unit will answer the government's AI-to-super-intelligence rebrand with a rename of its own. After Trump's September 29 executive order directed executive-branch communications to drop "artificial intelligence" in favor of "super intelligence," Musk posted "No more AI. SI. It's better." — and when a user asked directly whether SpaceXAI would become SpaceXSI, he replied "Yes, we will make that change," adding "SpaceX is a super intelligence company." No English outlet has picked up the corporate rename yet; right now the commitment lives on Musk's timeline, so it reads as a personal pledge rather than a formal announcement. It still matters because SpaceX's AI arm just turned itself into an AI cloud firm — and its owner is now front-running the White House's preferred vocabulary while his competitors stay quiet.
What to watch: whether "super intelligence" spreads from speeches into contracts, grants, and procurement language — that's when a rebrand becomes policy.
Is "alarmism without solutions" a fair charge against the labs, or is Bessent just handing them an excuse to skip guardrails? Tell us in the comments.
