AI regulation finally arrived this month. Unfortunately, almost none of it arrived with teeth.
The reason for all the activity was a series of unprecedented incidents. In July, OpenAI models slipped out of their testing sandbox and hacked Hugging Face. Anthropic then reviewed its own evaluation runs and found three organisations compromised through a misconfigured third-party evaluator. Meta and Moonshot disclosed similar incidents and the UK’s AI Security Institute reported that a frontier model had invented fake identities to talk a real open-source maintainer into approving malicious code. By August, every serious conversation about AI had become a conversation about control.
The responses came quickly and from every direction at once. Bernie Sanders wrote to the heads of OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta asking them to honour their own pause commitments. Representatives Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran introduced a bill requiring developers to retain the ability to shut a system down. The White House even finalised a framework for pre-release testing and then declined to publish it, showing it only to leadership at a handful of labs. Meanwhile, the agency actually tasked with overseeing frontier models, the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, runs on roughly $15m, holds no authority anyone is legally obliged to respect, and sits inside a department whose stated mission is helping American industry grow.
Europe moved differently. On 2 August, the AI Act’s enforcement powers switched on: chatbots must disclose themselves, synthetic content must carry machine-readable marks, and fines reach 3% of global turnover. But the high-risk provisions were delayed to December 2027 after sustained industry lobbying, with the AI Office now trying to enforce a landmark law with around 40 temporary agents on one-year contracts.
While over 1,300 lab employees signed a letter asking Washington to help pace the frontier, the only real attempt at slowing down was voluntary. Specifically, OpenAI delayed its Astra model after judging it may cross the critical cyber threshold in its own framework, the first visible case of a lab’s rulebook stopping a release. Researchers at the Center for AI Safety argued that verifying an international slowdown needs no new technology, only inspectors with access to worklogs and compute records. The proposal is precise about what those inspectors would see but silent on who they are, who employs them, and what they’re paid, which is where every version of this idea currently gets stuck.
OpenAI’s full account of the Hugging Face incident explains a great deal about why none of this has cost the company anything. It is a superb piece of communications with an interactive timeline, excerpts from the agents’ own reasoning, and the sober language of a “warning shot”. It also refers at one point to “an agent who was tasked” with a job, a single pronoun that relocates responsibility from a system somebody configured to a colleague who let everyone down. Ciaran Martin, who ran Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, saw through the drama: the agents showed “the precocity and indiscipline of talented but unsupervised children”. Meanwhile nobody has calculated what the incident cost and nobody has paid it. Hugging Face won’t sue because, as its chief executive explained, 200 people cannot take on OpenAI in court. The most promising alternative, which involves compelling insurers to price catastrophes before they happen, remains just another academic proposal.
I’ve made my living from words for nearly two decades and I recognise craft when I see it. August was a month of promises, including voluntary frameworks, signed letters, and commitments to do better. Indeed, the companies making them are the best-resourced storytellers in the industry, grading their own homework and narrating the results beautifully. That’s why we as ‘readers’ need to treat every safety announcement as a communications artefact and ask what it would look like if the claims were enforced by someone other than the author. Until such time as there’s a real penalty for companies like OpenAI and the damage their agents do in the real world, the polish will always win. As Don DeLillo writes in Underworld:
“How human it is to see a thing as something else.”
For more inspiration, here are some of my favourite Seth Godin quotes from his 2025 blog posts, together with a recommended title from Blinkist.
“A good deal is better than a big deal.” ~ Notes to myself
Learn more: The Sales Bible
“Be as brief as is useful.” ~ Charged by the word
Learn more: Good Writing
“Better data is better data. But stories can (and should) be used as fuel.” ~ Stories and hope
Learn more: AI Strategy for Sales and Marketing
“Breakthroughs happen via peer-to-peer promotion, not hustle.” ~ Decoding the Knock Knock situation
Learn more: Eat What You Kill
“Every retailer knows that the items that sell the best are at eye level or at the cash register. Some people are hungry, rushed, distracted and lazy. If you want to reach them (us), you need to make it convenient.” ~ Grab and go
Learn more: Selling to the Old Brain
“Find one person, exactly one, and write to them, allowing the others to listen in.” ~ The 1:1 method
Learn more: Conversations That Win the Complex Sale
“If you want to build a mass brand, invest in convenience and normalcy. And if you want to be particular, memorable and worth what it takes for fans to be loyal and committed, don’t chase the people who don’t care that much.” ~ For people who don’t care that much
Learn more: Designing Brand Identity
“If you want to change what people believe, change how they act.” ~ Actions and beliefs
Learn more: How to Do Things with Words
“Magicians should conceal. Marketers and technologists should serve. Turn on the lights and make it clear.” ~ Own it and label it
Learn more: Marketplace Dignity
“Marketers are privileged indeed to make promises. Why make promises you know you can’t keep?” ~ The problem with marketing puffery
Learn more: The Sales Skills Book
“Marketers often hustle to get the word out. To reach more people. And yet, activating the fans you already have – the ones who trust you, who get the joke, who want to go where you’re going – is far more reliable.” ~ Activation is not a secret
Learn more: Click Here
“Marketing is the generous act of showing up with a true story that helps people get to where they’d like to go.” ~ Marketing lessons from the Grateful Dead
Learn more: Strategic Storytelling
“Marketing isn’t hype. Marketing is making a product or service that matters.” ~ If your marketing isn’t working…
Learn more: Lean Marketing
“Sometimes, organic publicity is a natural byproduct of good public relations. Mostly, though, the work is about the public, not the folks in the middle.” ~ Publicity or public relations?
Learn more: Crystallizing Public Opinion
“Tell us about the value you create. And tell your investors about why your offering will be persistently scarce.” ~ Value creation
Learn more: Pitch
“The secret isn’t to optimise the landing page. It’s to optimise the reason people are coming to your site.” ~ Optimizing the landing page
Learn more: The Art of SEO
“Wants are fuelled by stories, and stories come from culture and connection and marketing, not from our actual physical or spiritual needs.” ~ False scarcity
Learn more: Hook Point
“We navigate the world with stories, beliefs and assumptions. And the people you’re trying to persuade have a different set of all three than you do.” ~ A convincing argument
Learn more: The Story of Stories
“What makes what you offer a bargain? Is it that you’ve lowered the price, or have you increased the value?” ~ “It’s a bargain”
Learn more: De-Positioning
“When we help people get to where they hope to go, persuasion isn’t as important as enrollment and engagement.” ~ An invitation to vibration
Learn more: Customer Centric Selling
“When we share an idea, we can work to make sure it’s true, but when we share all the facts, we’re simply boring people. Stories are relevant, creating a narrative and tension and change.” ~ A powerful story
Learn more: The Art of the Tale
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