Abandoning AI Safety Might Screw Our Cars Up

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If you do not follow the day-to-day drama of the artificial intelligence industry, you probably missed the news this week. Anthropic, one of the leading AI labs that built its reputation on safety, quietly dropped its core safety pledge.

To the average person, this probably sounds like inside baseball for tech bros or maybe the beginning of a paranoid article about “ex-risk” (the robots are going to kill us all). But, if you drive a modern electric vehicle or plan to buy one in the next few years, this policy shift is something that’s more likely to crash right into your dashboard.

Modern EVs are essentially multi-thousand-pound rolling supercomputers. Right now, every major automaker is in a desperate race to integrate Large Language Models (chatbots) into their infotainment systems and driver assist features. But Silicon Valley’s decision to embrace a “move fast and break things” mentality with AI is going to create a massive divide in the automotive world.

Giving up on these safety guardrails will force the automotive industry to split into two very distinct, very frustrating camps that make us worse off in their own ways.

Camp 1: Incumbent Auto Restricts to the Point of Annoyance

Traditional automakers are inherently risk averse. They have decades of experience dealing with massive recalls, liability lawsuits, and federal safety standards. If all of the AI companies drop their liability shields, these legacy brands are going to panic and clamp down.

If a standalone AI app gives you bad advice, you blame the app. If your dashboard AI tells you the wrong thing about how to handle regenerative braking while taking a travel trailer down a steep grade and you crash, the automaker is the one staring down a massive lawsuit.

To protect themselves, Incumbent Auto (IA) will heavily “sandbox” their AI integrations with highly restrictive system prompts. Instead of a truly smart, free-thinking co-pilot that can intelligently manage your battery telemetry and route planning, we are likely going to get a heavily restricted voice assistant that’s good at about nothing.

Instead of getting a voice assistant that can tell you about places to stop that are along your route instead of ten miles behind you, it will be neutered to the point of annoyance, refusing to answer anything beyond what is already printed in the owner’s manual just to avoid legal risk.

Camp 2: The Tech Car Bros Throw Caution to the Wind

Then you have the other side of the industry. The Tech Car Bros are already as allergic to caution as the incumbents are risk averse. They treat public roads like a Silicon Valley beta test, and they are going to view Anthropic’s pivot as a green light to put “Mechahitler” into your Tesla and hope for the best.

Speaking of Tesla, it spent years selling the promise of “Full Self-Driving” only to execute a clever legal switcheroo, rebranding it to “Supervised Full Self-Driving.” In my view, it is a brilliant way to shift the liability back to the driver while continuing to push beta software to millions of cars on public streets.

You also have companies like Comma.ai in the aftermarket space. While it doesn’t sell an autonomous vehicle system, it does enable drivers to experiment with open source software that does it. This shifts not only supervisory liability to the driver, but development and testing liability as well. Most people take this responsibility very seriously, but there are a few idiots who’ve gotten themselves and other people on the road into serious trouble hacking at the code and removing safeguards Comma built into its software to be good corporate citizens.

For this group, Anthropic backing away from safety pledges validates the exact “throw caution to the wind” culture either they or some of their users already operate in. If the leading AI labs do not care about guardrails, the Tech Car Bros will just follow what the other bros are doing. We will see beta self-driving software pushed to public roads faster than ever to appease shareholders, prioritizing data collection over proven reliability.

Waking the Regulatory Bear

The whole reason AI companies signed these voluntary safety pledges in the first place was to keep government regulators at bay. By dropping them, they practically guaranteed that federal agencies are going to step in.

Right now, the Tech Car Bros might be loving the current administration’s push to remove regulatory barriers for autonomous vehicles. But the political winds can change rapidly after the 2026 and 2028 elections. When an agency like the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration decides to regulate emerging software under a tighter administration, they tend to use a sledgehammer.

In my opinion, the tech bro camp will predictably complain and blame “the libs” for over-regulating when the hammer inevitably falls. But they are not idiots. They know this regulatory backlash is coming, and they are doing it anyway to capture market share today in the hopes of massing a user base ready to fight for them later.

NHTSA is already deeply skeptical of beta software controlling heavy vehicles. If sweeping AI regulations get passed because the Tech Car Bros push things too far, they will catch the risk-averse Incumbent Auto camp in the crossfire. We could see a future where simple software updates to improve battery thermal management get bogged down in months of bureaucratic red tape simply because the underlying code falls under a new, broad definition of “AI.”

The Bottom Line

Silicon Valley might be comfortable moving fast and breaking things, but breaking a line of code on a website is vastly different from breaking the code on a heavy electric truck doing 75 mph down the interstate.

By backing away from their own guardrails, AI companies are forcing the auto industry into a corner. Half the market is going to annoy you with hyper-cautious, locked-down software, while the other half treats your daily commute like a live science experiment.

But, the industry doesn’t have to put itself and us through all this hassle. If they’d keep their own voluntary safety and responsibility pledges, we wouldn’t have to worry about automakers and/or the government clamping down.