Big Tech’s Call for Light Touch on AI Falls Flat With Enforcers

Artificial intelligence could help cure cancer, ease energy insecurity and reduce poverty – if regulators would just get out of the way.

That was the message from executives with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s Google at an event in Washington on the sidelines of the world’s largest antitrust conference.

Regulators need to “be careful not to fight the last war,” Google’s top lawyer Kent Walker said. “The stakes here are too important to fall victim to partisan politics.”

Across the street at the main event, however, antitrust enforcers were less convinced of the need to ...