Top Biden officials including Vice President Kamala Harris and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo are set to sit down with leading tech executives Thursday to discuss the future of AI and Washington’s role in it.
The meeting, according to an invitation obtained by Yahoo Finance, promises to be a “frank discussion of the risks we each see in current and near-term AI development,” as well as possible actions to mitigate those risks.
In attendance will be the Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai , Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, according to the White House.
“This is complicated,” said Secretary Raimondo in an interview with Yahoo Finance ahead of the gathering. “Probably the most complicated tech policy discussion possibly that we’ve ever had, and the administration wants to be very serious and thoughtful about it.”
The meeting comes as the explosive growth of platforms like ChatGPT has tech leaders and Washington policymakers debating how heavy a hand Washington should have in the emerging technology in the years ahead. There are concerns AI could have widespread implications in the national security arena as well as in American society overall.
A technology that could ‘screw up our democracy’
AI is a technology so powerful that it even has the potential to “allow an evil country, competitor to come in and screw up our democracy,’ former Google CEO and Chairman Eric Schmidt told Yahoo Finance this week from the 2023 Milken Global Conference.
Schmidt added that the potential and dangers of AI – many of the most visible AI applications, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are currently less than six months old – will take a long time to be felt across the country and in Washington.
“If you look at the history of technology, it’s a decade before you really see the transformative nature of it,” he said.
Still, regulating AI is tricky, especially since tech regulation hasn’t been Washington’s strong suit.
Europe has been more proactive when it comes to tech regulation at-large, instituting laws like General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, which governs how personal data can be used in the European Union. However, in terms of AI, there’s still a lot of feeling around in the dark. In this respect, Schmidt told Yahoo Finance, the U.S. isn’t alone.
“At the moment, Europe is doing almost nothing in this space, so we don’t really have any examples,” he said. “They have a law which requires that the system be able to explain itself if it’s used in something critical. By definition, these systems today can’t explain themselves — by the way, nor could your teenager if you have a teenager.”
A representative for Anthropic confirmed to Yahoo Finance that they will be in attendance Thursday at the White House. Representatives from Google and Microsoft declined to comment.
A series of plans from Washington DC
A White House official says that this week’s meeting is part of a broader administration effort to engage with the technology and formulate a response from the government. Another shoe set to drop later this month is a formal report planned from Raimondo’s department with recommendations on how the government should approach AI technology.
The Commerce Department group – dubbed the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee – is looking at national security as well as how AI could have social implication. That includes the introduction of bias as AI applications find their way into more and more corners of American life.
“When social media and such was being developed, there was this mantra of move fast and break things,” Raimondo said in an interview. “We can’t allow that to happen here.” AI has great potential, she added, “however with those opportunities come substantial risk, risks that we may not even understand fully today.”
The plan also comes in addition to recent releases from the Biden administration around things like an AI Bill of Rights and a risk management framework for the technology.
On Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has announced his own effort to “get ahead” of artificial intelligence, linking the issue directly with America’s ongoing competition with China.
The Senate leader says he is working on what he describes as “a new regulatory regime that would prevent potentially catastrophic damage to our country while simultaneously making sure the U.S. advances and leads in this transformative technology.”
Also in attendance at Thursday’s meeting will be a range of top White House officials from Chief of Staff Jeff Zients to National Security advisor Jake Sullivan to NEC Director Lael Brainard.
The invitation notes that Biden officials will press the companies on safety, noting an “expectation that companies like yours must make sure their products are safe before making them available to the public.”
Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance. Allie Garfinkle is a Senior Tech Reporter at Yahoo Finance.
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