Obama rips Trump over AI policy amid 'doomsday' warnings

Barack Obama has found religion on artificial intelligence, and he chose a college lecture hall in upstate New York to share his revelation. The former president told Colgate University students that Washington must step in and regulate AI before it's too late. That's a strange spectacle from a man who spent eight years in the Oval Office cheerleading the very tech giants now building these systems, with barely a peep about the risks until he was back on the lecture circuit.

The timing is convenient. Now that Silicon Valley's biggest donors have shifted allegiances and the current administration is taking a hands-off approach to let American innovation run, the old guard has discovered a sudden concern for humanity's future. Obama's "doomsday" talk mirrors the panic coming from a segment of the tech industry that wants rules written by people who have never built anything, aimed squarely at the companies and researchers actually making progress. We heard the same hysteria about the internet, about social media, and about every transformative technology since the printing press.

Here's what we're not hearing from the critics: a coherent plan that protects American leadership without strangling it. Allowing development to proceed under a clear legal framework, with existing agencies applying current laws, is a legitimate policy choice. Trump's approach is to keep America in the race, not to handcuff our best minds and hand China the AI crown. Regulation for its own sake isn't leadership. It's the reflex of a political class that fears what it doesn't control. Obama had his chance to set the rules; instead, he left a mess of tangled mandates that did little to address actual misuse. We'll take American competitiveness over academic hand-wringing any day. The former president can fret from his perch. The rest of us are trying to build.