When the rules for an industry finally get written, guess who shows up to help write them. The industry. Every single time. They call it providing technical expertise. The hens have a different word for it.

The polite name for what happens next is regulatory capture, and the important thing to understand about it is that it needs no villains, no bribes, no smoky rooms. It’s a machine made of reasonable steps, and it assembles itself. Let me walk you through the assembly.

Step one is the expertise trap. The technology is genuinely complicated, so lawmakers need it explained. Who understands it? Almost exclusively the people building it. So the briefings, the definitions, the very words the law will be written in arrive courtesy of the companies being regulated. Every individual choice here is defensible. There’s simply nobody else to ask. And yet the sum of the defensible choices is a rulebook drafted by its subjects.

Step two is the revolving door. The regulator’s sharpest people get offered several times their salary to switch sides, and many do, because mortgages exist. Meanwhile industry veterans rotate into the agency, bringing their assumptions with them like carry-on luggage. Give it a few years and you have one workforce wearing two badge colors, everyone friendly, everyone planning to work for everyone else eventually. Hard calls get softer when the person across the table is your future employer.

Step three is the funding squeeze. The agency polices an industry worth more than most countries on a budget that wouldn’t cover that industry’s snack program. So it can’t run its own tests, can’t attract its own experts, can’t independently verify much of anything. It becomes dependent on the industry’s own reports, the industry’s own evaluations, the industry’s own data. Homework, graded by the student, on the student’s honor, with the student’s calculator.

Step four is the friendly rule, and it’s the punchline. Eventually regulation does pass. And it has a strange shape: thick with paperwork that only giants can afford, which conveniently walls out smaller competitors, and mysteriously thin on the things that would actually bite, like external testing or liability for harm. At which point the biggest players do something that confuses everyone: they publicly welcome regulation. Newspapers call it maturity. It isn’t. When the largest companies in a market ask for rules, read the rules. The fox isn’t objecting to the henhouse. The fox is consulting on the blueprints, and the door, as specified, will be fox-sized.

Now here’s why this matters more for AI than for any industry that came before it. Capture runs on expertise asymmetry, and the asymmetry here is the worst ever recorded. These systems are opaque even to their own makers. Any outside evaluator has to borrow the lab’s tools, the lab’s access, the lab’s framing, just to look. A referee who needs the team’s permission to watch the game isn’t a referee. He’s a guest. Capture doesn’t need to corrupt anyone here. It’s the default physics of the situation, and it will happen on its own unless something is deliberately built to resist it.

I want to be careful not to preach despair, because that’s the playbook’s favorite outcome: see, referees always get captured, so why bother. Wrong lesson. Capture is a known disease with known treatments: independent technical capacity, cooling-off periods for the door, funding that doesn’t crawl to the regulated for permission. Boring medicine, all of it. The point of this post isn’t that referees are hopeless. It’s that a real one has to be designed against capture from day one, on purpose, by people who’ve read this playbook too.

Tonight’s exercise. Imagine you’re refereeing a match where one team wrote the rulebook, funds your training budget, employs half your former colleagues, and controls the only replay footage. You’re honest. You’re diligent. Now watch, in your head, how your calls drift anyway, one reasonable benefit-of-the-doubt at a time. Then ask what it would take to referee that match straight. Whatever you just listed, notice that nobody is currently building it.