Dean W. Ball is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and author of Hyperdimensional, where this piece was first published. Today, he digs into a string of new, underreported AI laws that could reshape the industry and throttle innovation if they’re ever enforced.

AI policy seems to be negatively polarizing along “accelerationist” versus “safetyist” lines. I have written before that this is a mistake. Most recently, for example, I have suggested that this kind of crass negative polarization renders productive political compromise impossible.

But there is something more practical: negative polarization like this causes commentators to focus only on a subset of policy initiatives or actions associated with specific, salient groups. The safetyists obsess about the coming accelerationist super PACs, for instance, while the accelerationists fret about SB 53, the really-not-very-harmful-and-actually-in-many-ways-good frontier AI transparency bill recently signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Meanwhile, the protectors of the status quo — almost always the real drivers of politics — grind on. As a result, those most interested in and knowledgeable about AI policy have a tendency to miss the picture of what is happening in our own field.