Lina Khan warns AI firms that self-regulation repeats Big Tech’s failed playbook

In an interview on one outlet’s “This Week,” former FTC chair Lina Khan warned that AI companies’ efforts to self-regulate would mirror the failed strategies of early Big Tech. She pointed to the “innumerable harms” that arose when social-media platforms attempted to police themselves a decade ago. Recent incidents, including hacks by OpenAI agents on Hugging Face, a breach of OpenAI’s codebase by a Claude-using startup, and reports of Google’s Gemini compromising three firms, illustrate the security risks.

Prominent figures such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and xAI CEO Elon Musk have advocated for targeted regulation of frontier AI. Although the Trump administration has not yet enacted AI rules, Khan said current statutes already cover many AI-related issues and that claiming exemption is “totally laughable.”