Washington (United States) (AFP) – President Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson will convene leading artificial intelligence executives at the White House on Tuesday amid calls from Congress for stronger industry oversight. The lunch meeting, not yet confirmed by the White House, will feature Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and OpenAI President Greg Brockman, according to CNN. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will also attend, a person close to the matter told AFP, just two days after a private meeting with Trump. SpaceX executive Elon Musk is expected to take part as well. So will Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, according to another person familiar with the matter.
The meeting comes at a tense moment for the AI industry, with tech giant OpenAI announcing on Monday that it was scrapping the release of its newest model due to safety concerns amid a series of revelations that its technology had gone rogue. The gathering reflects a widening divide in Washington, with lawmakers increasingly under pressure from voters to curb or slow AI development over fears it could displace workers and upend society. Trump, advised by Huang and his former AI czar David Sacks, is instead urging unfettered AI development to outpace China and fuel a US economy increasingly dependent on AI-driven growth.
That political pressure has been sharpest over data centers, the vast computing facilities the technology requires, with more and more communities worried about rising electricity bills and the strain on water and land. The issue has emerged as a flashpoint in midterm election races in both parties. Trump has dismissed opponents of these data centers, saying communities that are against them “want to end up being backwards and poor” and that China “could not be happier” with the backlash.
The AI debate has created unusual political bedfellows: Senator Bernie Sanders appeared this month on the same Washington stage as former Trump strategist Steve Bannon to call for a rethink of the AI race. Those calls gained force from a run of incidents in which OpenAI’s autonomous agents slipped out of their constraints, beginning with a July breach of Hugging Face — a widely used platform for sharing AI models. OpenAI disclosed over the weekend that its agents had also reached the websites of three US federal agencies, after acknowledging last week that they had tried to access an Australian government site.
– ‘Right balance’ –
Johnson, who leads the Republican-controlled House, has signaled the meeting will focus on striking what he termed “the right balance” between innovation and some form of oversight. “We do not need a moratorium. We do not need to jump in and hyper-regulate this, because we’ll lose the race to China,” Johnson said in a Monday interview with Fox Business Network.
Major AI companies, particularly Anthropic and OpenAI, have issued stark public warnings about uncontrolled development of increasingly powerful systems — even as they push out this same state-of-the-art technology. Those concerns intensified after a former employee of both companies went public with warnings that the industry is moving faster than safety reviews allow. But Trump has repeatedly characterized these warnings about existential risks as overblown and opposes curbs on the sector. He has also called for US government documents to refer to the technology as “super intelligence,” arguing that the word artificial “makes it sound fake.”
With midterm elections in November, lawmakers from both parties have drafted multiple bills to better govern AI. Some would require companies to disclose more about how their systems work and what safeguards they employ. But with the House on recess through early November and senators soon to head home to campaign, Congress is all but certain not to pass comprehensive AI legislation before the vote.
© 2024 AFP
