The AI regulation trigger must move. The market will not fix the system alone

Thesis: Washington and Beijing, the two regulatory poles, are saying the same thing this week, though for different reasons. Industry self-regulation is not enough. The difference is when the state steps in, not whether it does at all.

In an interview with NBC News, Bill Gates appealed to the US Congress to regulate artificial intelligence development. "Nobody thinks industry self-regulation alone is enough," he said when asked directly if Washington must intervene. His answer was clear: yes, and the requirements must be mandatory. He admitted this places a burden on the industry but argued it will not significantly slow its work. Gates did not deny the risk that AI could threaten humans within a few years. He added a second point: bad intentions combined with the latest AI tools can now cause damage on a mass scale.

Thousands of kilometres away in Shanghai, economist Liu Yuanchun, rector of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, put forward a thesis that complements rather than contradicts Gates. Liu argues AI is not an ordinary technological change but a "supertechnology." Its impact on economic growth, time, and operational methods exceeds the current concept of technology. Therefore, the regulation trigger must move much earlier. The state should plan ahead instead of reacting to consequences.

Liu’s argument rests on an open letter dated 13 July 2026, signed by nearly 200 researchers and entrepreneurs, including 16 Nobel laureates. The letter outlined three main points: this AI differs from previous technologies, its effects exceed imagination, and governments must build oversight and safeguard mechanisms. He also notes that economists who were recently sceptical about AI, such as Acemoglu, have changed their minds. They now study its impact on employment structure and income stratification. Liu’s conclusion is unambiguous: the belief that a "spontaneous order" will settle itself gently must be abandoned.

A third statement this week leads to the same conclusion, though from a completely different angle. Jensen Huang of Nvidia stated that if frontier labs cannot ensure the safety of their systems, "we have to shut them down." He pointed out that AI experiments where runaway agents commit violations create civil and criminal liability for the labs. It is notable that this comes from a company selling accelerators, the entity that benefits most from rapid AI development. Even Huang accepts that the limit is control, not speed.

The juxtaposition of these three voices is striking. Washington should pass a law, Beijing should move the trigger, and the largest hardware maker allows for shutting down labs. Markets dislike such ambiguity, but politics can no longer pretend not to hear it. What matters today is not whether to regulate, but from when. Every month of delay increases the cost of fixing a system that nobody fully controls. The era in which a manufacturer's voluntary declaration was enough ended the moment models began to act on their own.