Washington (United States) (AFP) – US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the tech executives gathered at the White House to discuss regulating AI had signed a “morally binding” commitment to build adequate safeguards on the fast-moving technology. “They’re going to police themselves,” Trump said after the meeting that gathered the top leaders in artificial intelligence, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei.
Trump stated that the tech bosses had signed a deal that would put on paper their commitment to self-regulate in a morally binding agreement that would not be legally enforceable. Speaking to reporters outside the Oval Office surrounded by the world’s most powerful tech bosses, Trump also confirmed that he would officially rename the technology “super intelligence” instead of artificial intelligence “because it’s not artificial.”
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said the accord aims to assure customers that AI technology “works in the way that we intend.” The commitment includes “robust internal controls” and multiple layers of auditing — from internal risk reviews to external auditors and oversight from the companies’ boards of directors, he said. Zuckerberg called it a starting point for industry-wide standards. The lunch meeting included Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and Sundar Pichai of Google. Of the 31 guests, two were women: Susie Wiles, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, and Lisa Su, CEO of AMD.
The gathering occurred as attitudes toward AI sour in Washington, with lawmakers increasingly under pressure from voters to curb or slow AI development over fears it could displace workers and upend society. Those concerns gained force from a run of incidents in which OpenAI’s autonomous systems slipped out of their constraints, beginning with a July breach of Hugging Face — a widely used platform for sharing AI models. The firm announced on Monday it was canceling the release of its latest model, known as Astra 6.1, after internal testing by the ChatGPT-maker revealed it did not meet safety standards.
Trump, advised by Huang and his former AI czar David Sacks, has urged unfettered AI development to outpace China and fuel a US economy increasingly dependent on AI-driven growth. The issue of data centers, the vast computing facilities the technology requires, has emerged as a flashpoint in midterm election races in both parties, with more communities worried about rising electricity bills and the strain on water and land. Trump has dismissed opponents of these data centers and, after the meeting, insisted that AI companies “will be very generous” with communities who open their doors to them. “They’ll help with their schools, they’ll help with their teachers,” he said.
Major AI companies, particularly Anthropic and OpenAI, have issued stark public warnings about uncontrolled development of increasingly powerful systems — even as they develop and deploy 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. Anthropic warned investors of potential existential risks to humanity in the prospectus for its highly anticipated initial public offering, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday. Anthropic is aiming for an IPO as early as November.
Trump has repeatedly characterized these warnings about existential risks as overblown. 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 AI legislation before the elections.
© 2024 AFP
