Bannon seeks China cutoff to buy time for US AI regulation

Steve Bannon — the podcaster, entrepreneur and provocateur who was an early backer of President Trump — has parted with the president on artificial intelligence, sharing a stage this week with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and echoing some of Sanders’s concerns about the technology, even as the two differed on what to do about it, NPR reported.

“This is one we’re going to have to disagree on,” Bannon told NPR’s Steve Inskeep.

Trump said this week that the only necessary “guardrail” for AI is a “smart president,” which was how he described himself.

Bannon, who has railed for years against tech leaders who have become Trump’s allies, called for immediate executive action on AI regulation while Congress works on longer-term legislation. He did not back a halt to American AI development, and he expressed skepticism about the motives of technology companies now asking Washington for help — arguing that new rules could give the largest labs a competitive “moat” while allowing them to shift financial risk onto the public.

“This technology has some real upsides to it, but you have to be realistic,” Bannon said.

In Washington, a once-abstract debate over AI oversight is turning into a much noisier fight as people building the technology sound urgent warnings. Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher, announced his resignation in early September and raised concerns about increasingly capable AI systems. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei then called for slowing the development of more powerful models, a position backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI’s Elon Musk. Trump has rejected calls for a slowdown, warning that such a move could give China an advantage.

His approach to China is more sweeping.

“I want to shut it down,” Bannon said, referring to China’s access to U.S. AI technology. He argued that cutting China off would give Washington time to build a regulatory system, potentially modeled on the Atomic Energy Commission.

“If you shut down the Chinese Communist Party and AI, which we can do because we give them everything, we can then take our time and set up a regulatory apparatus,” he added.

Bannon also called for expelling Chinese nationals who are employed by American AI companies. This would not be a small change. A Carnegie Endowment for International Peace study found that 87 of 100 top Chinese AI researchers who were working at U.S. companies or universities in 2019 were still at U.S. institutions years later. Separate research found that U.S.-China AI collaboration has occurred more often than collaboration between any other two countries since 2018.

Trump is planning to host Chinese President Xi Jinping on Sept. 24, pending confirmation from Beijing, according to NPR.