AI leaders call for regulations, Trump dismisses 'hoaxes'
AI giants are working to create a standards body amid rising alarms about the dangers of the industry. Meanwhile, Trump has dismissed the warnings, and a divided US Congress has failed to act.
Prominent figures in the artificial intelligence industry are proposing the establishment of a regulatory body to oversee the rapid development of AI technology, amid growing concerns over its potential dangers. OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT platform, has joined forces with competitors Anthropic and Google to create a self-regulatory organization.
This proposed body would function similarly to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, which oversees securities firms in the US. Demis Hassabis, DeepMind's CEO at Google, has advocated for a federal agency to test powerful AI systems before they are made available to the public, suggesting that industry funding would be used to attract top talent and provide necessary computational resources for large-scale testing.
Two former employees of major AI companies have recently voiced their concerns about the potential risks posed by unchecked AI development. Jacob Coxon, a former OpenAI researcher, resigned from Anthropic, warning that AI companies are "gambling with our lives." Bilal Chughtai, a former Google DeepMind scientist, has warned that AI poses a threat to humanity's existence and that we may be "running out of time" to prevent such an outcome.
Despite this growing consensus among industry leaders, US President Donald Trump has dismissed calls for stricter AI regulation as mere "hoaxes" and a "conspiracy." The divided Congress, where Trump's Republican Party holds a narrow majority, has thus far failed to take any action on the issue. The upcoming midterm elections, which will likely keep the Republican hold on Congress, make it unlikely that any legislation will be enacted in the near future.
Moreover, the issue has received little attention from the administration, which has been praised by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang for seemingly ignoring the warnings about AI's potential dangers. Huang attributed Trump's stance to the president's belief that the claims about an impending AI apocalypse are "not grounded on science." While some leading Republicans, such as Vice President JD Vance, have expressed caution regarding unregulated AI development, smaller AI companies have criticized the dominant American firms for forming a potential "cartel" to impose safety measures.
Canadian AI company Cohere's chief, Aidan Gomez, accused the leading American AI labs of creating a "cartel" under the guise of promoting safety. Gomez wrote in a blog post that the main issue is not about implementing safety measures but about who decides what those measures should be and who benefits from them.
Written by urgent.news from DW English (Top Stories)'s reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
