On Monday the President posted that the only guardrail artificial intelligence needs is “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.” The reflex in Washington and in the labs is to treat this as an obstacle. It is better understood as a warning. Since the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Slaughter in June, every federal agency save the Federal Reserve answers to the White House. An AI regulator would be no exception. Bernie Sanders wants a pause until a new cabinet agency is in place. John Thune wants an office with the power to block a model’s release, an implementer wearing an oversight badge. Treasury wants a FINRA for AI that reports to a Treasury official. Each proposal ends with a federal official that works for the President, and whom the President can fire at will.
The labs know this. That is why Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk have each said, in their own registers, that they want rules and fear the regulator. They have a better option than they realize, and it is sitting in their own filing cabinets.
Every position in this debate assumes that governance begins when government acts. The record says the opposite. Before releasing AlphaFold, DeepMind consulted more than thirty outside experts in biology, biosecurity, bioethics and human rights, and their advice shaped the release. Every major lab now publishes a safety framework naming the capabilities that would stop a launch, and since January, California requires the largest of them to publish that framework and to report serious incidents within 15 days.
Every model ships with a system card, the equivalent of a drug’s package insert, listing what it cannot do and where it fails. Outsiders now test before release. Britain’s AI Security Institute received OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 ahead of launch, found a universal jailbreak and published the result. METR, an independent evaluator, was given a month this spring with unreleased models at four labs at once. In April, Anthropic concluded that its most capable model was too dangerous for general release, confined it to a small group of defensive cybersecurity partners, and widened access only in July after the federal government signed off. Microsoft built a full internal government. A committee of senior executives writes its Responsible AI Standard. An Office of Responsible AI enforces it through champions embedded in every engineering team. Its Sensitive Uses review has handled more than 1,900 cases since 2019, 450 of them in the past year, reasons from precedent, escalates to the chief executive, and once refused to put real-time facial recognition on police body cameras. A board committee oversees all of it.
I documented these structures in a book on how companies govern themselves before the law arrives. The striking finding was what governments did next. The European Union’s AI Act did not invent a regime. It copied the one the firms had built, with its rulemaking, its executive review and its monitoring, almost intact. In AI, regulation follows from governance, not the other way around.
What the companies cannot build is the one thing that makes any of this credible to an outsider. Nobody independent checks that the process happened. We have already run the experiment of trusting structure instead. OpenAI’s nonprofit board was designed as the check on its chief executive, and it dissolved on contact with him. Charters and mission statements do not implement themselves. What binds is a procedure that someone outside inspects. California registered the inspectors last week. But what are they inspecting against? The missing piece is a written standard that sets requirements frontier labs must satisfy, plus a corps of auditors who verify that each lab did what the standard says. Accounting solved this exact problem fifty years ago, and I have spent much of my career studying how.
Accounting standards were not written by a government. In 1973, the profession’s own bodies set up the International Accounting Standards Committee in London, and for a quarter century it was a club. Then the SEC refused to recognize its rules unless the club changed. In 2001, the standard-setting board was severed from the industry that paid for it. Its members became full-time, gave up their firm affiliations and drew salaries from a foundation they did not control. In 2009, a monitoring board of securities regulators, the SEC and the European Commission among them, took a veto over who sits on the board and nothing else. Today more than 140 jurisdictions require those standards. The United States never adopted them and never had to. Its own board, FASB, is the same design under a different flag, and American law recognizes it precisely because it is private.
Here is what should interest this White House. Whatever a federal AI agency certifies will not be believed in Brussels, Tokyo, Delhi or Riyadh, because everyone now knows who controls it. A board with no national owner can be adopted by other governments without embarrassment. That is the entire prize for American firms. A rule that a foreign regulator trusts is the passport an American model needs to be sold there. It exports American practice without a treaty, without an agency, and without a single federal dollar spent. The President keeps a seat on the monitoring board and keeps the power to say no.
The labs have been meeting since July. The White House AI Adviser, David Sacks, has already warned them to “stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel.” The labs have coordinated on practice for years, through the Frontier Model Forum and shared red-teaming norms, and the result was safer models, not higher prices. What separates a cartel from a standard-setter is not the intentions of the people in the room, but the standard-setting process itself. The people who write the standard must be full-time and without any financial ties to the industry they regulate. The money must sit in a foundation the companies fund but do not direct. The governments that adopt the standard must hold a veto over appointments and nothing more. And compliance must be verified by registered auditors, not by the companies grading themselves.
That is the difference between an industry protecting itself and an industry making itself accountable. The labs know better than any regulator when a model is ready, and they have built the processes to make that call. What they must now do is hand that call to someone they cannot overrule. An agency cannot play that role. A standards board can, and it would give American companies a rule the rest of the world is willing to trust.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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