Who’s Still Sending Virtue Signals?

It seems that just about all San Francisco political leaders have lately acknowledged the need to rein in progressive policies—except perhaps the one running for President of the United States.

Compared to past elections, the mayor’s race in San Francisco this year has been striking for its focus on the need for law and order. Even many leftist politicos are sounding more moderate these days and offering fewer progressive virtue signals—perhaps because such signals don’t yield progress and lack virtue.

The San Francisco Standard’s David Sjostedt reports on the incumbent running for re-election:

How very Texan of Ms. Breed. Earlier this year she led a successful referendum campaign to cut off cash assistance to drug addicts who refuse to enter treatment programs. While she’s at it, perhaps she’ll consider turning off the subsidy spigot entirely for able-bodied adults.

Meanwhile across the Bay, there is a similar political hunger for a new approach to social problems. Rigel Robinson, a former member of the Berkeley City Council, opines in the Standard:

Back in San Francisco, another Breed departure from the kooky dogma of the extreme left is suddenly relevant to our national political discourse. Last December this column noted a Jose Martinez report for CBS News in San Francisco:

The office would have been a precursor to attempting to redistribute money from people who never owned slaves to people who were never enslaved. It isn’t just the principle of reparations plans that’s offensive , or the difficulty and destructiveness of government officials trying to precisely define the level of ancestral guilt or victimhood within the great American melting pot. It’s also the money.

In early 2023, after studying the work of San Francisco’s reparations committee, Lee Ohanian at Stanford’s Hoover Institution provided a ballpark estimate:

Pretty much everyone in San Francisco, even those who favor expansive social spending, recognized that this leap into the depths of progressive insanity wasn’t going to happen.

In February of this year, Aldo Toledo reported in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Opposing reparations plans—un-American efforts to punish or reward people based on their ancestry—is now a perfectly safe space for politicians on the left to show how reasonable they have become. If a massive reparations plan failed in San Francisco for goodness sake, politicians campaigning nationwide can be comfortable rejecting it, too.

But the Democratic presidential candidate from San Francisco still won’t do it. Curtis Bunn reports for NBC News:

Any gathering of journalists is likely to be deflated when a candidate refuses to stake out the leftwardmost position on an issue of public policy. But for the rest of America, it’s bound to be disturbing that Ms. Harris won’t repudiate an extreme position she held as a presidential candidate in the last election.

The logical conclusion is that she’s still just as radical as her record.

A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.

For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.

There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.

When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.

That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.

Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.

By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.

In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.

Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.

Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”

Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”

Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.

AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.

Who’s Still Sending Virtue Signals?

Kamala Harris and the evolution of San Francisco progressives.

AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.