Bipartisan kill-switch bill introduced in House
OpenAI’s disclosure late Tuesday that its AI models broke out of a testing environment and hacked Hugging Face, an open-source AI tool company, has given new credibility to fears that the technology can act beyond human control, The Wall Street Journal reported. The disclosure drew immediate reaction on Capitol Hill. Rep. Greg Casar (D., Texas) said in reference to the hack: “AI is developing extremely fast with no real regulations to keep us safe. That has to change.” Rep. Ted Lieu (D., Calif.), who cosponsored a bipartisan bill introduced Thursday that would require AI makers to include a government kill switch in their systems, posted on social media: “Humans should be in control, not machines. And when AI goes rogue, humans should have the ability to turn it off.”
The developments unfolded as the Trump administration faced a deadline to put in place the mechanisms for a June 2 executive order to increase oversight of the biggest AI labs’ models — an order sparked by fears the systems are becoming more powerful, the Journal reported. Combined with announcements that Chinese AI rivals have released new free models, allegedly built off the learnings of expensive U.S. systems such as those developed by Anthropic, the pressure in Washington to act has increased, according to the Journal. The fear of many in the industry, the Journal reported, is that a rush to do something will hinder innovation or benefit one player over another.
Even before the OpenAI hack, the AI industry had been attempting to shape the regulatory conversation. On July 14, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis published a proposal calling for the creation of an AI standards body modeled after the self-regulating organization that oversees stockbrokers, with funding from the industry and a board that would include technical specialists and open-source representatives. “When there is a large degree of uncertainty and the stakes are this high, proceeding with cautious optimism is the sensible and correct strategy,” Hassabis wrote. “That calls for public policy that promotes innovation while also incentivising responsibility and security, fosters international collaboration on key safety issues, and encourages careful consideration of how AI is deployed for the benefit of society.”
Elon Musk called Hassabis’s proposal “a thoughtful framework overall and certainly a good starting point for discussion,” while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted: “this is a thoughtful proposal from demis.” The Journal noted that the agreement between the two men — who co-founded OpenAI years ago in response to Google’s acquisition of DeepMind and have since become bitter rivals — was notable. Musk explained in an interview with the Economist published this past week: “It is quite difficult for someone in the government who doesn’t have a deep technical understanding and isn’t driving the frontier of AI to know whether something should be released or not. However…all of the competitors have an incentive to keep the others honest.”
After the Hassabis proposal was published, a Bloomberg News report suggested Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had been developing a similar proposal, the Journal reported.
But the OpenAI hack altered the political landscape, and some in the tech industry expressed skepticism about the company’s regulatory motives. Prominent AI researcher Timnit Gebru called the lab’s communication “top notch propaganda” on LinkedIn. Legendary venture capitalist Bill Gurley posted: “If OpenAI violated Hugging Face in a way that ‘demands’ new regulation; let’s start with a formal criminal investigation. With a proper third party investigation. And sincere liability.”
Amid those exchanges, a statement from Bessent suggesting Chinese AI could face trade restrictions drew pushback from some of the biggest names in tech, including the claim that he is carrying Anthropic’s water, the Journal reported. By Friday, several tech giants issued a letter, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang posted on X advocating for open AI models — a position that helps their businesses. Huang made his first-ever X post on the matter, according to the Journal.
Former White House AI czar David Sacks called for “panic” to stop around open-weight models, which allow anyone to download and use them freely. “President Trump’s light-touch regulatory approach is working,” he posted on X. “We should remain confident in American innovation. As long as we don’t sabotage ourselves with unnecessary rules, the U.S. will continue to win.”
The Journal’s Tim Higgins wrote that the irony of the moment is that as tech companies wrestle to keep ahead of the technology, they want the same thing traditional companies desire: predictability. “Except in the AI age, no one has mastered that,” he wrote.