3 Reasons AI Safety Is Failing: Why e/acc Proves You’re Doing It Wrong
I’ve watched the "Alignment" debate for three years. I’ve seen the 100-page whitepapers. I’ve sat through the doom-scrolling Twitter spaces.
Last year, the industry spent billions on safety research. The result? A 2025 "AI Safety Index" where every major player got a C+ or lower. We are building the most powerful technology in human history on a foundation of "maybe."
Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) isn’t just a meme. It’s a correction. It proves that the way we’re doing safety is fundamentally broken.
1. Safety is now a Compliance Theater
Think about it. We have the Future of Life Institute grading OpenAI and Anthropic like they’re in middle school. These companies "state" they have safety frameworks. They "publish" transparency reports.
But when the pressure to ship hits, the brakes come off.
In 2025, we saw "Shadow AI" explode. Companies realized they couldn't wait for "perfectly aligned" models that refuse to answer basic questions because of built-in guardrails. They started deploying unaligned, open-source models (like DeepSeek) because they actually do the work.
If your "safe" tool is useless, people will use the "unsafe" one that works.
The market doesn't care about your ethical framework. It cares about ROI. By making safety a series of bureaucratic hurdles, we’ve created a "Compliance Trap." Builders are spending 40% of their time navigating red tape instead of fixing the actual code.
Safety isn't a checklist. It’s a technical property. E/acc understands this. You don't "align" a fire; you build a better engine.
2. Centralization is the Single Point of Failure
The "Doomers" want a global kill switch. They want a "Czar" of AI.
This is the most dangerous idea in the room.
If one committee decides what is "safe" for 8 billion people, you haven’t solved for safety. You’ve solved for control.
E/acc argues for decentralization for a reason. In a world of a million models, no single failure can end the system. We need an "adversarial equilibrium."
Think of it like the internet. Is the internet "safe"? No. It’s a mess of viruses, scams, and toxicity. But it’s also anti-fragile. It doesn't have a single point of failure because no one person owns it.
The current safety movement is trying to build a "Safe AI" walled garden. E/acc is trying to build a jungle.
The jungle is messier. But the jungle survives.
3. Deceleration is the Real Existential Risk
The biggest lie in the "Safety" movement is that slowing down makes us safer.
It’s the opposite.
If the US or Europe slows down to debate ethics for five years, they don't buy time for safety. They buy time for their adversaries to win the race.
A world where a "safe" democracy is two generations behind an "accelerated" autocracy is a world that is fundamentally unsafe.
You cannot fix the problems of technology with less technology. You fix them with more.
Slowing down is just a slow-motion suicide for Western innovation.
The Insight: Alignment is a Market, Not a Philosophy
The "Alignment Problem" is a ghost. We’ve been trying to solve it for decades with philosophy. We failed.
But the market is already solving it.
The market is the ultimate alignment mechanism. It selects for reliability. It selects for utility. It selects for truth.
In 2026, the companies that "won" weren't the ones with the most ethical committees. They were the ones whose models were the most useful.
Safety isn't something you add to a model. It’s what happens when a model is so efficient and reliable that it becomes the standard.
Stop trying to teach the machine to be "good." Start building machines that are impossible to break.
Are you building for safety, or are you building for control?