President Joe Biden held a meeting with CEOs of leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies, including Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, to emphasise the importance of ensuring AI products are safe before deployment. AI technologies, such as generative AI and applications like ChatGPT, have gained immense popularity this year, with companies in a race to launch groundbreaking products that could transform the nature of work.
These AI tools, which can perform tasks like medical diagnoses, screenwriting, legal brief creation, and software debugging, have garnered millions of users. However, there are increasing concerns about the potential for privacy violations, biased employment decisions, and enabling scams and misinformation campaigns. Acknowledging the current and potential risks AI poses to individuals, society, and national security, Biden urged the industry leaders to mitigate these risks.
During the two-hour meeting, participants discussed the need for greater transparency with policymakers regarding AI systems, safety evaluation of AI products, and protection against malicious attacks. The meeting was attended by Google’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Vice President Kamala Harris, and other administration officials.
VP Harris highlighted AI’s potential to improve lives while also stressing its safety, privacy, and civil rights concerns. She emphasised the “legal responsibility” of the AI industry leaders to ensure the safety of their products and expressed the administration’s openness to advancing new regulations and supporting new legislation on AI.
The Biden administration announced a $140 million investment from the National Science Foundation to establish seven new AI research institutes. Additionally, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget will release policy guidance on the federal government’s AI use. Leading AI developers, including Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, NVIDIA Corp, OpenAI, and Stability AI, will take part in a public evaluation of their AI systems.
AI-generated political ads are expected to become more common as AI technology proliferates. While US regulators have been less aggressive than their European counterparts in terms of tech regulation and rules on deepfakes and misinformation, the Biden administration has been working closely with the U.S.-EU Trade & Technology Council on the issue.
The Biden administration has taken several steps to address AI-related concerns, including signing an executive order to eliminate bias in federal agencies’ AI use, releasing an AI Bill of Rights and a risk management framework, and pledging to use legal authorities to combat AI-related harm. However, despite repeated promises to address issues like election propaganda, vaccine misinformation, pornography, child exploitation, and hate speech, tech giants have yet to achieve substantial success in combating these problems.
