Odd Lots · Friday, September 11, 2026
Greg Jensen stressed the urgent need for AI regulation, arguing for controls on both the labs developing AI and the open-source models. He stated that regulating labs is essential to understand their safety protocols and incidents, while open-source models pose a significant challenge because their use is invisible. Jensen believes that whether closed or open source, regulation is necessary because AI is not merely a 'screwdriver' but a powerful entity capable of causing harm.
“So, A, you have to regulate it. The way you have, you know, if you're going to go test biological... vaccines, et cetera. You have to go through a testing process. You have to run them in certain ways. We obviously need that. We're doing something more dangerous than those things. So we need a structure where the labs are subject to review, where people come in and they can put the employees under oath to say, okay, what's going on? Why is this safe? How are you handling safety? What are the incidents you've seen, et cetera, et cetera. You need to control the labs. You then need to regulate the models that get released to the public and have some monitoring of usage, right?”
“And so basically you got to figure out a way to regulate. It's not like open source, closed source, US, China, it's regulated, unregulated is the important thing here.”
“If you believe it's dangerous, if you don't, for some reason, think it's screwdriver. If the screwdriver is going around committing crimes, I would have a different view of screwdrivers. It ain't a screwdriver. It's going around capable of doing things that you and I wouldn't do. That's a big difference. And we have to reckon with it, whether it's closed or open source.”