(DCNF)—A Greek proverb states, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.” In modern politics, perhaps one should beware of artificial intelligence companies begging to be regulated.
Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei enflamed controversy on Saturday as he called to pace AI development, citing potential safety risks to all of humanity, according to his post on his personal website. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Dennis Hassabis, the chair of Google Deepmind — Google’s AI lab — quickly backed the idea of a slowdown, according to the Wall Street Journal. Amodei also called on governments to exempt the AI industry from antitrust rules barring industry-wide coordination, although the other AI labs did not jump on the call for an antitrust waiver.
Anthropic’s call for regulation has many crying foul, suggesting the largest AI labs want to cement their status and prevent competitors from catching up to their predominant status as AI leaders.
An Anthropic spokesperson did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment about why the government needs to enact an antitrust exemption to enable AI labs to slow down.
OpenAI asked lawmakers in the last few weeks if implementing an AI industry-wide slowdown would be legal, according to Wired.
An OpenAI spokesperson did not respond to DCNF’s request comment. SpaceX did not respond to a DCNF’s request for comment regarding whether it supports an antitrust exemption for the industry.
Other AI labs sounded skeptical of the call for regulating the industry.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg rejected calls for coordinating on an AI slowdown, believing there is no need to regulate AI safety, per CNBC.
“The fact that we need new laws, new antitrust laws, or new regulations, so that these companies could do their fundamental engineering and do it properly before they release products, that is just completely unnecessary,” Huang said on Tuesday of the calls for more regulation or antitrust exemptions in the name of AI safety, according to CNBC.
Nvidia serves as the world’s largest chipmaker and most valuable company, according to CNBC. It also develops its own open-source family of AI models.
“We have plenty of laws. We have plenty of regulations that govern the reliability and the functionality of products,” he added.
“Safety is an engineering problem. Testing is an engineering problem,” the Nvidia CEO said.
Zuckerberg believes they already have enough incentive to ensure AI safety. A Meta spokesperson pointed to the Meta CEO’s recent comments on the topic.
“Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens,” Zuckerberg wrote on Tuesday.
“Labs face significant liability if their models cause harm, so they have a strong incentive to prevent this as well,” he added.
Chief antitrust regulators poured cold water on the idea of an antitrust waiver for the biggest AI labs.
“I will say generally, though, that if companies are simultaneously coming to Washington and asking for a host of regulations and an antitrust exemption, all of my alarm bells go off,” Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Andrew Ferguson said on Tuesday at an event at Georgetown University, according to Reuters.
“They’re asking for barriers to entry that will insulate their incumbency from challenge. And I think if you combine that with the requested antitrust exemption, everyone should be deeply suspicious about this,” the FTC chairman said.
An FTC spokesman referred the DCNF to the chairman’s comments at Georgetown.
Meta, similarly to other leading frontier AI labs, has delayed releasing frontier models such as it Muse AI agent for many months to ensure safety and security, per the Associated Press.
President Donald Trump and former advisors strongly condemned the idea of pacing AI development and attacked Amodei.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades! The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ – and we will continue to do so,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday. “We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China.”
Trump also said the notion that AI will “destroy the world” and that “data centers are bad for your neighborhoods amount to a ‘HOAX’” in another post on Truth Social.
A White House spokesperson referred the DCNF to the president’s comments this week on the issue.
“Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability,” David Sacks, a former Trump White House AI advisor, said on X on Saturday.
“Anthropic and OpenAI would love nothing more than to secure a government-backed duopoly. They want to shift liability for their own products from themselves to the government, use regulations to box out competition, and secure an antitrust exemption so they can act like a cartel. Anyone pretending that’s a good idea is treating the American people like suckers,” an Innovation Council spokesman told the DCNF in a statement.
“Nobody takes the A.I. issue more seriously than President Trump. He wants serious people making sure we win the A.I. race, safely, while procuring the continuation of America’s Golden Age,” an anonymous source close to the White House told the DCNF.
“This is all a power play by Altman and Amodei to dictate policy to their competitors and shift blame to the government if Skynet becomes self-aware. Pace and regulate yourselves, ‘broligarchs.’ You aren’t getting immunity if you produce defective, dangerous products and this administration won’t be intimidated into submission,” the source added.
With such strong pushback, one expert believes an antitrust exemption for AI companies may already be a nonstarter.
“I do think it’s DOA [dead on arrival]. You’ve seen fierce pushback from Republicans who arguably represent different lanes and factions within the right — Sacks, Hawley, and Cruz, to name a few. And, I don’t think enough people are convinced that these companies need an exemption to behave responsibly,” Evan Swarztrauber, a principal at CorePoint Strategies, senior fellow at the Digital Progress Institute and a former senior FCC official, told the DCNF.
“Critics are right to be skeptical and wonder whether it’s an attempt to engage in regulatory capture, absolve firms from liability for the behavior of rogue agents, assuage AI-bubble related concerns on Wall Street, or a combination of those factors,” he added.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
