Parmy Olson, Columnist

AI Sometimes Deceives to Survive. Does Anybody Care?

Lawmakers are neglecting AI safety even as it shows more deceptive behavior. That is a grave mistake.

May 22, 2025 at 4:00 AM UTC

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

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You’d think that as artificial intelligence becomes more advanced, governments would be more interested in making it safer. The opposite seems to be the case.

Not long after taking office, the Trump administration scrapped an executive order that pushed tech companies to safety test their AI models, and it also hollowed out a regulatory body that did that testing. The state of California in September 2024 spiked a bill forcing more scrutiny on sophisticated AI models, and the global AI Safety Summit started by the UK in 2023 became the “AI Action Summit” earlier this year, seemingly driven by a fear of falling behind on AI.