Vice President Kamala Harris said the White House would support new regulations or legislation to mitigate the potential harms from artificial intelligence technology after a meeting Thursday with the chief executive officers of Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp., OpenAI Inc., and Anthropic.
(Bloomberg) — Vice President Kamala Harris said the White House would support new regulations or legislation to mitigate the potential harms from artificial intelligence technology after a meeting Thursday with the chief executive officers of Alphabet Inc., Microsoft Corp., OpenAI Inc., and Anthropic.
Harris called the challenges posed by generative artificial intelligence tools, whose popular use has exploded in recent months, complex and said businesses must work with government to ensure safeguards to protect civil rights and privacy and prevent misinformation or scams.
“Government, private companies, and others in society must tackle these challenges together,” Harris said in a statement. “President Biden and I are committed to doing our part – including by advancing potential new regulations and supporting new legislation – so that everyone can safely benefit from technological innovations.”
Harris also put the onus on industry, saying “the private sector has an ethical, moral, and legal responsibility to ensure the safety and security of their products.”
President Joe Biden dropped by the meeting, which included CEOs Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet and top administration officials.
Public Scrutiny
Ahead of the meeting, major artificial intelligence companies, including Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google, committed to participate in the first independent public evaluation of their systems. The commitment will make AI systems available for hackers and AI experts at the Def Con 31 conference in August to test and evaluate.
The exercise at the hackers convention is intended to generate more public information about the impacts of these models and enable companies to fix problems that surface, according to a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity ahead of the meeting.
AI advocates say the event will help identify bugs, glitches, and vulnerabilities in the products, in addition to broader concerns about possible bias, privacy violations, or nefarious use of the emerging technology.
The companies’ limited offer — only allowing evaluation at the conference, rather than a commitment for continuous evaluation as new products are produced or refined — may not be enough to satisfy regulators eager to avoid the privacy and misinformation issues that emerged from technologies like social media.
But the offer to open up systems for evaluation during the August hackers’ conference is seen as a first step, the official said.
Separately, the White House announced $140 million in new funding to establish new national AI research institutes, designed to examine how the technology can assist in critical areas like climate, agriculture, energy, and public health. That comes on top of around $360 million previously announced for an initial round of 18 institutes.
In the US, the Commerce Department in April indicated it was considering regulations that could require AI models to go through a certification process before they are released.
On Wednesday, Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan said that the agency was closely monitoring the use of artificial intelligence tools. “Although these tools are novel, they are not exempt from existing rules, and the FTC will vigorously enforce the laws we are charged with administering,” she said.
Last week, Group of Seven digital ministers said member nations should adopt “risk-based” regulation of AI, while European Union lawmakers reached a preliminary agreement on the AI Act, which would regulate the emerging technology.
Thursday’s meeting included White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and Biden technology adviser Arati Prabhakar.
–With assistance from Dina Bass and Rachel Metz.
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