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Regulatory capture is the mechanism Mark Zuckerberg is invoking as he argues that the United States should not ban Chinese artificial intelligence.
The Meta chief has warned that American rules governing the technology risk being shaped by the industries they are meant to oversee, a structural failure mode with a record in sectors well beyond tech.
In public-choice economics, capture describes how a regulated industry gains sufficient influence over its regulator to draft its own effective standards.
The damage is often definitional rather than visible in a single headline decision: which systems qualify as AI, which risk thresholds trigger disclosure, which actors count as covered entities.
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