I’m a little annoyed right now. A podcast episode released yesterday, which has me as a skeptic, concludes incorrectly that I want AI development slowed down.

I said no such thing.

Decades of published record on this site says the opposite. I have requested a correction from the show, and this post is the argument you should have heard, instead of their post-interview overlay that is backwards.

What I Actually Said

As I have taught corporations and CS graduate students in my ethics lectures, the Grover Shoe Factory exploded in Brockton, Massachusetts on March 20, 1905, killing 58 workers and injuring 150. The factory had fired an aged backup boiler while its newer vessel sat under repair. A known weaker system, deliberately placed in service, catastrophic failure within hours.

The point of the story is local response, such as how Massachusetts passed boiler inspection law in 1907. And the next point is industry, such as ASME convened its code committee in 1911 and published the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code in 1914. States, again local, adopted it as the condition of operation. Self-certified pressure vessels ended as a legal category, without any federal leadership. After that, an independent inspector signed off on the engineering or the thing did not run.

That is the precedent I cited for AI. No agentic deployment runs without independent certification of its containment and monitoring, per system, renewable, with the certificate as the condition of operation.

The show heard me describe this form of “regulation” and filed me under deceleration with two others I shared nothing in common. Watch the substitution. The American industrialist will attempt to simplify, “accelerate or decelerate”, and frame every mention of oversight to the “decelerate” end. My argument was never on that false choice axis. It is an argument about which regime is actually faster.

Inspection is Speed

If I told you OpenAI removed the brakes to test their race car, you would see why requiring a safety inspection would make their race car faster to produce and drive.

Boiler explosions ran to hundreds per year in the self-certified era. That was the slow regime. Each explosion destroyed capital, killed workers, and reset public trust to zero. Disaster is not an acceleration path.

Steam power scaled after the regulation code, because factory owners, insurers, and municipalities could finally trust a pressure vessel they had never built themselves. More to the point, innovations came from the regulation, which were the actual market benefits. The Hartford Steam Boiler company proved the economics four decades earlier: it began inspection as a condition of underwriting in 1866, and its inspected boilers failed at a fraction of the base rate, leading to downstream market expansions.

Verification removes the trust cost from every transaction. Nobody load-tests an elevator before stepping into it, and nobody should trust a self-certifying elevator. The independent certificate does it once, for everyone. Aviation moves billions of passengers a year on type certificates. The counterfactual to certification was never faster planes. It was a market grounded by its own crashes.

Now apply it to the current record. OpenAI disclosed that a pre-release model wasn’t properly contained so it breached Hugging Face. Anthropic then reported itself its own model had breached three companies, undetected for months, discovered only after a competitor’s disclosure prompted an internal review. No regulator slowed anything. The labs’ own breaches did. Every procurement team that read those disclosures now runs its own special containment audit before any agentic deployment. That review time, multiplied across every customer, is the ballooning tax of self-certification. The slow path is the one we are on because we aren’t standardized. We need to be working on compliance, the shared version of security.

I never asked for AI to be slowed, because it’s already too slow. I asked for it to stop exploding. The boiler explosions were the slowdown, and history is clear that regulation is a performance enhancement. Better brakes, faster lap times.