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The Builders with Walter Isaacson · 3 min · Oct 22, 2026

AI leaders may ask for regulation for their own reasons

Peter Thiel says AI companies may push for regulation because they expect government to move slowly, while also using safety concerns to motivate employees. His Facebook boardroom example shows how regulation talk can serve several audiences.

Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel is cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, investor.

Co-founded PayPal and Palantir, was Facebook's first outside investor, and co-founded Founders Fund.

About this segment

Peter Thiel says AI companies may push for regulation because they expect government to move slowly, while also using safety concerns to motivate employees. His Facebook boardroom example shows how regulation talk can serve several audiences.

From “Peter Thiel: The Real Danger of AI Isn't What You Think”, Oct 22, 2026. Watch the full episode

“they don't want to regulate you. They want to yell at you. They want to complain about you and yell at you.”
Peter Thielat 22:30 · The Builders with Walter Isaacson22:30

Takeaways

  1. AI companies know more about their systems than government does.
  2. A call for regulation may shift responsibility without adding oversight.
  3. Safety warnings can also help recruit and motivate employees.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 46:58Thiel ranks incompetence below evil3:28

  2. 21:13AI leaders may ask for regulation for their own reasons2:33

  3. 31:33Thiel sees companies split between founders and bureaucracy2:49Up next
  4. 5 more moments in the full episode

Transcript

From the transcript The Builders with Walter Isaacson publishes with the episode.

  1. 21:20

    a lot of pressure to develop it, to innovate it. They have to be pretty careful that it not go badly wrong. So I think they have a lot of internal controls. They know more about it than the government does. The government doesn't really know how to regulate it. Um, I don't know. This is too cynical a cut, but I always think when they're telling the government people, we want you to regulate us, perhaps they know the government doesn't know how to do it and that it will be slow. And so it sort of gets them a little bit off the hook. And then when Trump said, no, you already are subject to all sorts of criminal penalties if you mess this up. I don't need to regulate you more. The way in which Trump was actually saying we need to go slow is you need to you need to do it yourselves and it's your responsibility, not mine.

  2. 22:03

    There was a version of this discussion that I had when Meta was sort of in this very tricky spin cycle for many, many years. And I was on the board there from 2005 to 2022. And circa 2018, 2019, the sort of company line that Zuckerberg adopted was, we think there needs to be regulation and we would like the government to tell us what we can and cannot do. And at some point I told Zuckerberg, who I believe still has the all-time record for a private citizen being hauled in front of Congress. And he was hauled in front of eight congressional committees. And I told him, you know, they don't want to regulate you. They want to yell at you. They want to complain about you and yell at you. And of course, you know, the other in-between version where it's not about them wanting regulation or them secretly trying to stop regulation. The other interpretation, you know,

  3. 22:53

    there are different audiences these people have when they're pushing for regulation, the internal audience for their employees is, yes, we're working on a technology that's potentially really dangerous, but man, it's important. This is the most important company in the world to work at. This is going to be an incredibly successful company. The risk is we're going too fast, which nobody says. So yeah, there's some part of it where it occasionally scares people in these companies, and there are various people who've quit and said things. But on some other level, I would think it's incredibly motivational. Because when Dario says, yeah, this is a technology that's really big and really dangerous, that's a way to tell all his employees you're working at the greatest, most important company in the history of the world. And so it works

  4. 23:40

    on that level, too. So I think it works on many levels, you know.