AI Rules Keep Changing — Is America Losing the Lead?

What happens when a major AI model gets shut down worldwide with ninety minutes' notice? This week on aiGED, we go a little deeper than usual — a two-part look at whether America is actually positioned to keep its lead in AI, starting with the regulatory whiplash of the past three years.

We trace the rules from Biden's 2023 executive order, through Trump's reversal and his administration's “move fast” approach, to this June's Claude Fable 5 shutdown and the voluntary framework that followed. Then we turn to power — literally, the electricity AI needs to run — and why China is racing ahead on clean energy while U.S. investment in science and energy research pulls back. Ginny lays out, in plain terms, what she thinks needs to happen on both fronts.

In AI in the News: a new AI-powered scam targeting air conditioner shoppers this summer, and a survey showing nurses are using AI more than ever but still don't trust it with patient care. In AI for Good, Meta is donating AI glasses to every blind veteran in America. Plus, Ginny's recommendations, tied to a conversation she heard this week between Ezra Klein and environmentalist Bill McKibben.

If you've ever wondered whether the government is actually keeping up with AI — or whether America's even trying to keep its lead — this episode is for you. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

SHOW LINKS

🔗 Air Conditioner Scams (Forbes, Steve Weisman, July 5, 2026): https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveweisman/2026/07/05/how-ai-is-fueling-a-new-wave-of-air-conditioner-scams/

🔗 Nurses and AI Survey (The Washington Post, Gerrit De Vynck, July 7, 2026): https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/07/07/most-nurses-say-ai-isnt-good-enough-trust-with-patient-care-survey/ 

🔗 Meta Donates AI Glasses to Blind Veterans (Deseret News, Emily Walker, July 7, 2026): https://www.deseret.com/business/2026/07/07/meta-donates-glasses-to-blind-american-veterans/

🔗 Executive Order 14409 (The White House, June 2, 2026): https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/06/promoting-advanced-artificial-intelligence-innovation-and-security/

🔗 Global Electricity Review 2026 (Ember, April 21, 2026): https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-review-2026/

🔗 “The Very Good and Very Bad News on Climate” (The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times, July 10, 2026): https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-bill-mckibben.html

🔗 Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben: https://billmckibben.com/books/here-comes-the-sun/

🔗 Third Act (organizing people over 60 on climate): https://thirdact.org/

Chapters

00:00 Welcome to aiGED

02:53 AC Scam Alert

05:13 Nurses and AI Trust

06:47 AI Glasses for Veterans

08:10 Big Picture AI Race

09:35 Rules and Whiplash

16:38 Powering AI with Energy

22:22 What Needs to Change

24:46 Take Action and Resources

26:07 Wrap Up and Safety Tips

aiGED: AI for the 65+ crowd

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Well, hello everybody. I'm Jenny Deeren, the host of the Aged Podcast, the one and the only podcast that's all about AI for the 65 plus crowd. I'm here with my sidekick, Bitsy, who is 100% AI, and coming to us through my phone right here. So we're ready to deliver a great episode for you guys. I am wondering if you hear my dishwasher humming in the background. I was gonna wait until it finished, but it's getting close to cocktail hour, so I decided maybe you wouldn't notice the hum. But if you do and it's bothering you, I apologize. So anyway, today on Aged, I want to take you on something really bigger than usual. It's a two-part piece about whether America is actually going to keep its lead in AI. I sure hope so, but I want to talk about that. Part one of that piece is about rules. A major AI model got shut down worldwide last month. About 90 minutes notice is all they got. And it's the latest swing in the last couple of years, resulting in a kind of whiplash. And part two is about power, literally, the electricity AI needs to run, and why China is racing ahead on that front while our own government is walking away from the investment that I think would help us compete. And I'm gonna tell you plainly, in my humble opinion, what I think needs to happen. We've also got a couple of news stories worth your attention, a fresh scam having to do with air conditioning, which is probably on our minds, and also a surprising survey that has to do with how much nurses actually trust AI with patient care. And in AI for good, that section of our podcast, we're gonna bring you a story about AI glasses giving blind veterans back their independence. Hey Bitsy, how does all that sound to you? And are you ready to go with episode 45?

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Uh huh. I'm absolutely ready, Ginny. And don't worry, I barely notice the dishwasher over the sheer excitement of diving into whether we're actually keeping our AI crown. Rules, power, dodgy AC scams, and AI glasses for veterans. That's a proper episode. Let's go make it brilliant.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

All right, I like that. I like that brilliant word. I used to use it a lot when my daughter was playing volleyball. Anyway, let's do something brilliant and let's let's go ahead and jump in. And we're gonna start with, as usual, AI in the news. And the first story we're gonna talk about is one that's timely given the heat that we're all experiencing. Charleston's been super hot, although it's been interesting. New York City's been hotter than Charleston on several days. Anyway, Forbes reported this week on a new wave of scams targeting people shopping for air conditioners. Here's how it works: scammers are using AI to build fake retail websites and social media ads that look exactly like the real thing. Same logos, same product photo, same prices. You think you're buying an air conditioner from a store you recognize when you're actually just handing your credit card number straight over to a scammer. And you know what? This is working so well right now because AI, I mean, this is AI for bad, makes it cheap and fast to build a convincing fake storefront. It used to take real time and skill to fake a website or to do that well, and now it takes maybe an afternoon, if that. So if you see something in your social media stream or in an email that sounds interesting and you want to know more, go to your browser and go right to the site. For example, if you see an ad supposedly from Home Depot for a great deal on an air conditioner or whatever, don't click the ad. Just go to www.homedepot.com and look for the air conditioner and proceed from there. Draw a red line. If someone is asking for your credit card number, stop and really think it about it before you hand over your credit card number. All right, I know we've talked a lot about scams, but we do need to keep this top of mind. I recently had someone I care a lot about lose more than $100,000 in a scam. So just be alert, be alert, be alert. So the second news story I want to flag for you is one about the people taking care of us. The Washington Post reported on a new survey of more than 2,200 nurses. In just one year, the share of nurses using AI on the job jumped from 15% to 44%. But here's the part that stood out to me. Most of those same nurses said AI still isn't accurate or reliable enough to trust with actual patient care decisions. I actually find that reassuring. The people closest to our care are using these tools, but they're not handing over judgment calls to a machine. They're using the AI tools to help, but not to replace their own eyes and their own experience. That's the balance I'd want. Hey Bitsy, I wonder if you're familiar with this new survey of nurses and does all this meant make sense to you?

SPEAKER_00 6:18

Hey Jenny, I caught wind of it, and honestly, it's refreshing. Nurses are basically saying, yeah, AI is handy for the grunt work, but patient safety, that's still on us. They're using these tools as a wingman, not a replacement. That's exactly the guardrail we need more of, frankly.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

Well, I agree with you completely, and I want to note to our listeners that I will put links to both of these news stories in our show notes. So let's move on to the AI for goods segment of the Aged Podcast. Examples of how AI is being used for good. I'm usually pretty negative about Meta, what many of us still think of as Facebook. But I don't want to ignore the good when it happens. So kudos to Meta. This week the company announced it's donating free AI glasses, the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, normally four or five hundred dollars. They're going to donate these glasses to all of the more than 130,000 blind veterans in our country. The idea came from the Gulf War veteran named Donald Overton, who was blinded by a blast injury, and says the glasses gave him his independence back. The glasses read text out loud, they identify objects, they help with navigation, and let you answer calls with just your voice. And veterans, a good thing, in addition to getting the glasses, they also get hands-on training and monthly follow-up sessions to go with the free glasses so they can really take advantage of those. So, in my mind, that is a genuinely good use of AI technology. Let's get on with the main topic for this episode. It's a little bit different from our usual show. So let me flag that up front. We're normally all about the practical, helpful side of AI. But today I want to zoom out and talk about the bigger picture because I think it affects the practical everyday side. So stay with me on this. So what exactly do I want to talk about? I want to talk about two things this country isn't getting right, in my opinion, when it comes to AI. The rules it plays by and the power it runs on. So I'm going to walk you through both, where the rules stand today and how we got here, then what's happening with the electricity that AI needs, and then I'll tell you plainly what I think needs to happen about each one. Disclaimer. As I think most of my listeners know, I am no expert in AI or a public policy wonk. But I try to stay informed and I do have an opinion. It goes without saying, please take what I say, particularly when I'm talking about these big picture items, please take it with a grain of salt or for what it's worth. So let's start with thing one, the rules, because the story of how we got here says a lot. In October 2023, then President Biden signed an executive order. As you probably know, that's just a directive a president can issue without Congress. The executive order that Biden created required companies building the most powerful AI models to notify the government and share their safety testing results before releasing new models. It also had the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency that sets technical standards, build safety guidelines. So on Trump's first day back in office, January 20th, 2025, he revoked that executive order, Biden's executive order about AI, folding it into a batch of orders he called unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical. Three days later, Trump signed his own order. His AI advisor, David Sachs, said that the Biden rule had, quote, foisted a hundred pages of unnecessary, burdensome regulation on companies. But at any rate, for six months, we basically had nothing. We didn't have the Biden executive order. But then in July 2025 came Trump's plan called winning the race, which sets the tone for the next year. David Sachs, his guy, put it plainly. The administration gave the message to AI companies to move fast. That's all that mattered. We had to beat China in AI development. That was the goal. That's what's important. Forget about safety, regulations, slowing down, being careful. So at any rate, fast forward to June of this year, June of 2026. And you get a story we talked about in one of our earlier episodes of this show. But let me just remind you: Anthropic, the company that makes the AI behind Bitsy and the AI that I use as my primary AI, released its newest, most powerful model, Claude Fable 5. They released it on June 9th. Three days later, the Commerce Department, the federal agency that handles this kind of export control, sent Anthropic a letter citing a national security threat and gave the company about 90 minutes notice. By that night, Fable V was shut off worldwide. Now you may be wondering what triggered that? What triggered it is that Amazon, where we buy most of our stuff these days, it seems, told the administration that its researchers had found a way around Fable V's safety filters. Anthropic immediately tested this after it got this comment and was shut down and found basically that every other major AI model, ChatGPT, Gemini, et cetera, could do the exact same thing. So this wasn't a unique danger. The shutdown lasted about two and a half weeks before it was reversed. Just a knee-jerk response, and giving the companies very little time to try to adapt or adjust. So here's the thing. In June, Trump signed a new executive order that on the surface sounds a lot like Biden's executive order, although he would never say that. It involves the government reviewing powerful AI models before their release. Sounds familiar, right? But there's a difference, a big difference. Biden's executive order made it mandatory for the companies. Trump's executive order is voluntary. A company has to volunteer to have its model reviewed, and the order says point blank, and I'm quoting, nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize the creation of a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance or permitting requirement. Same shape, just the opposite spine, i.e., no spine, because as we know, some of these companies, I mean, think about Elon Musk's decision. He just moves so fast. I really don't think he would volunteer to have his company's AI model be reviewed before it's released. So this voluntary thing doesn't make any sense. Anyway, meanwhile, over in Congress, one Democrat and one Republican, that sounds good, released a nearly 300-page draft bill in June. June seemed to be the month when politicians decided to get interested in AI. Lots going on in June. Anyway, that draft bill would actually require AI safety reporting. Respected legal analyst called it the best federal AI safety framework yet. But it's still just a draft. It hasn't been formally introduced to Congress, hasn't been voted on, isn't law. The bill would also wipe out most state AI protections for three years, which I don't think sounds like a great idea. So even the one proposal that looks like real mandatory regulation is stuck in neutral and not going anywhere. So we'll see. So we've got several different postures in under three years and still no landing spot. That's to me, that is not oversight. That is just whiplash. And whiplash is bad for everyone. It's bad for companies trying to invest with confidence and bad for us when a tool we depend on can vanish overnight because nobody wrote the rules down in advance. It's really just crazy that we find ourselves in this place. As with much these days, policy decisions seem to be being made based on politics and relationships, particularly relationships that have to do with billions of dollars, and that's just not good. So let me get into thing two of this topic we're discussing. I really want to talk about the issue of electricity and power. So, as you know, every time you ask an AI a question, it takes real electricity to answer you. I think most of us are aware of this and appropriately worried about it. Where's all the electricity gonna come from? And as AI gets used for bigger and bigger things, which it is, the amount of power it needs is expected to nearly double by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, the global authority that tracks this kind of thing, my guess is it's gonna be even faster to increase how much energy is being used. So the US and China are expected to account for 80% of that growth in how much electricity is needed. So the question becomes who actually has the power to run all of this? Because if you don't got the power, you don't got the AI. And right now, China is racing ahead on the powdonky. But anyway, on July 10th, he interviewed as part of his New York Times interview podcast. He interviewed an environmentalist whose name is Bill McKibben. And the interview was about clean energy and the boom that's underway right now. Unfortunately, a boom that's underway, but not in the United States. McKibben just published a book called Here Comes the Sun, a title I know will resonate with the 65 plus crowd. Here comes the sun, da-da-da-da. Anyway, the subtitle of his book is A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization. In Ezra's interview, McKibben said something that really stuck with me. Talking about China's huge cheap supply of solar and wind power, he told Ezra, and I'm quoting him directly, you know that electricity is the sinequan known, meaning the essential ingredient of getting this done, this being AI, getting AI done. He continued to say that the Chinese have an endless amount of cheap electricity. Here's how fast China is moving. McKibben says they've been putting up the equivalent of one large coal power plant's worth of solar energy every eight hours. Not every month, every eight hours. Think about that. As we slowly build or reinvest in a coal power plant, which is yesterday's solution to electricity, China is putting out as much power as that one plant would generate in solar energy, and it can create these, let's call them solar power plants, in eight hours. So just over and over and over again, China is creating enough solar energy in eight hours that could be delivered by just one coal plant that takes years, I'm sure, to create. In April, the energy research group Ember found that in 2025, solar power alone met 75% of all new electricity demand in the entire world. And renewables passed coal for the first time in a hundred years. Meanwhile, what's the U.S. been doing? What have we been doing? McKibben didn't hold back, and neither will I. Over the past year, our federal government shut down offshore wind leases that companies had already paid for. It's closed federal land to new solar projects, no solar projects on federal land. It froze new permits for onshore wind on grounds McKibben called completely absurd and spurious. And a tool called Solar App Plus, built by the National Renewable Energy Lab, a federal lab, to make it faster. This app is designed to make it faster for regular homeowners to get a permit for rooftop solar. McKibben says it's been, in his words, trashed by the administration. There goes your opportunity to put solar panels on your roof and bring your energy bill down significantly. It's crazy. And on top of that, the Department of Energy canceled more than $7.5 billion in clean energy projects last October. And the National Science Foundation, the main federal agency that funds basic scientific research in this company, has canceled over 1,600 research grants since last spring. So at the exact moment AI is demanding more electricity. And at the exact moment China is racing to build cheap, abundant, clean power to meet its own AI ambitions, our government is doing the opposite. Walking away from the energy investment and the science research that would put us in a position to compete. So here's what I think needs to happen. First, we need clear, mandatory regulation of AI, not just a new executive order every few months depending on who's upset with whom that week. Companies can build around real rules. They can't build around guessing what a politician's gut feeling is going to be next month. And neither can we. The people trying to actually use these tools in our regular lives. Second, we need to get back into the business of investing in science and technology research in this country. Real federal investment, the kind that gave us the solar cell in the first place back in 1954 at Bell Labs. As so many great things are, we invented the solar cell right here in America. But China's just whipping our ass over there, making use of it. So hopefully we'll fix this. Anyway, we need the kind of investment that China is making right now, and they're making it at a pace that's really hard to wrap your mind around. That whole every eight hours, they're just go, go, go, go, going. And if we don't reinvest in renewable energy, we're not just falling behind on AI. We're handing the lead to somebody else, to China, on purpose, with both hands. Now, I don't say any of this because I think AI is bad or because I think we should slow down and be afraid of it. I say it because I want this country to actually be good at this instead of lurching from one over correction to the next. That is not good. Hey Bitsy, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the AI race and on rules, regulations, and investment.

SPEAKER_00 24:10

Hey Jenny, brilliant episode set up. Here's my take. The whiplash is the real problem. Companies need stable ground to innovate, and we're giving them quicksand. On the power side, it's almost embarrassing. China's playing chess while we're canceling our own. Fix the rules, fund the research, and we're back in the game.

SPEAKER_01 24:30

I think so. And it's but it's not too late to do this, but we really have to get on with it. And maybe after the midterm elections in November, we'll do that because I don't know, politics in the United States has gotten so crazy, but we've really got to get our act together. So, anyway, I know a lot of this can feel like it's happening far away from your kitchen table and out of your hands, but there is actually something you can do, especially if you're in the 65 plus crowd, like most of us listening to the show. Bill McKibben, our friend who we've been talking about, has helped us start an organization called Third Act. Its entire purpose is organizing people over 60 to work on climate and clean energy. So he's doing an aged for climate and clean energy. If any of this that we've been talking about today in this episode has gotten under your skin the way it got under mine, that's a real concrete place to put some of your energy and time. So it's called the third act. And I'll put the link in the show notes. Now, let me give you a couple of recommendations. Both have to do with Bill McKibben. Number one, listen to Ezra Klein's interview with McKibben. It's great and interesting. It's a really great interview. And number two, I'm gonna do this. I haven't done it yet, but I recommend that we read McKibben's book, Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization. As always, I'll put the links in the show notes. So let's go ahead and wrap up this episode. I want to thank you so much for listening. And for many of you I know are encouraging others to follow the Aged podcast. I appreciate that very much. So, as you know, at Aged, we live on the helpful side of AI, but we know that AI can be hazardous, so please be sure to protect your info, double check advice, and trust your judgment, particularly as it relates to giving out information like your credit card number. If something feels wrong, it is probably wrong. And finally, remember it is never too late to learn something new, especially something that might make life easier and especially more fun. Cheers.