Cohere co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez has published a pointed argument that a small group of market-dominant Silicon Valley AI companies should not be the ones defining global safety standards for a generational technology.
In a blog post titled "Who Gets to Define the Rules for AI?", Gomez writes that artificial intelligence will completely transform how society discovers medicine, manages power grids and secures national infrastructure within a generation. Many people realize this and are working to build that future responsibly. But he questions whether the same companies building these systems should also set the rules for how fast the technology advances and what safety standards apply.
Gomez calls for "evidenced standards, not a cartel" — arguing that AI governance should be built on independent, evidence-based standards developed through broad multi-stakeholder processes, not unilateral decisions by a handful of companies that simultaneously determine the pace of development. He suggests that allowing a few market-dominant players to define both the technology and its constraints creates an inherent conflict of interest that no amount of good faith can resolve.
The post arrives at a moment when AI governance is being actively debated. Anthropic's Dario Amodei published his own "pacing the frontier" plan, while the US political establishment weighs in on AI speed versus safety. Gomez's argument adds an important voice from outside the frontier-lab bubble: the companies building AI should not also be its sole regulators, and the standards that govern this technology must be developed independently of the commercial interests driving its development.
