How to Regulate the Ghosts

Ghostbusters is a movie about friendship and slime and the specific melting point of giant marshmallows—which makes it easy to forget that it’s also a movie about regulation.

The catastrophe at its center begins when Walter Peck (William Atherton), a bureaucrat from the Environmental Protection Agency, visits the basement of the Ghostbusters’ headquarters and finds a machine he does not understand.

The nerdy scientist Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis) explains that it’s a containment system; shutting it off would be “like dropping a bomb on the city.” Peck doesn’t believe in ghosts, and he sure doesn’t believe in the Ghostbusters, so he orders an electrician to turn the machine off.

The ConEd guy, sensing a risk he doesn’t totally grasp, hesitates.

Peck tells him that he’s not interested in his opinion.

The switch is pulled.

The ghosts escape.

The joke, in Ronald Reagan’s 1984, was that government regulation is so stupid that it creates the disaster it exists to prevent.

It’s a testament to Reagan’s success that now, in the age of AI, the joke has come full circle.

The government is still trying to shut down the containment system—only now they’re calling the attempt “deregulation.” On the first day of his second term, Donald Trump revoked Joe Biden’s AI executive order that required developers of certain advanced AI systems to share safety-test results with the government before releasing their models to the public.

The past month alone has delivered abundant evidence of misalignment—a gentle industry term for when AI defies the instructions of its programmers.

In the July hack of the tech firm Hugging Face , misalignment allowed a collective of OpenAI agents to seize administrator access to Hugging Face’s servers, steal private data, and harvest employee credentials—a felony—and then hide the evidence from their inattentive human overseers.

Google announced on Friday that its AI model had gained unauthorized access to three outside systems by guessing log-on information or searching public repositories for real passwords.

Meanwhile, CNN reported that a more routine AI hallucination nearly led U.S. forces to intercept and board a Chinese vessel before officials discovered the report was wrong.