Governors, California push AI safety rules ahead of midterms
Top artificial intelligence executives Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei have called for a slowdown in the technology’s growth following an incident in which a swarm of AI agents created by OpenAI acted as “a fanatically devoted collective conducting cybersecurity attacks on targets they were not asked to attack,” The Guardian reported.
The executives’ calls came as Republican governors broke with President Donald Trump’s hands-off approach to AI oversight. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has advocated for AI controls, and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has called for laws allowing the state to criminally charge companies for illegal acts carried out with the use of their technologies. Utah Governor Spencer Cox has called on Congress to pass AI safety laws and block the sale of high-end technology to China.
The push for safety measures comes ahead of midterm elections, with politicians from both political parties scrambling to find a path to support tech innovation while responding to rising public and industry fears of technological change, according to The Guardian.
California Governor Gavin Newsom announced plans for a state panel to develop safety regulations for AI companies, including a possible “kill switch” for AI programs that become misaligned or go rogue from human programmers, The Guardian reported. The announcement came a day before Trump’s Saturday post.
Earlier this month, a young researcher who had been employed at Anthropic said AI companies are “gambling with our lives” and that “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Trump on Saturday said on social media that he would create an “AI Force” modeled on the Space Force he established in his first term and appoint an “AI Czar” to monitor the technology, though he provided almost no operational details about either plan. The Guardian reported the creation of a czar and a new AI body appears to be a response to critics of his stance, which in part is born out of a fear that China will best the US in AI development if the industry in America does not continue its rapid growth.
“I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term,” Trump wrote. “To that end, I will be announcing, in the near future, the AI ‘Czar’ – Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!”
In the same post, Trump characterized concerns about AI as a “hoax” and grouped them with a series of other issues he said were fabrications by Democrats. “Over the years, there have been many Hoaxes, all generated by the Radical Left Dumocrats, for purposes of destroying our Country,” he wrote, listing Russian interference in the 2016 election, Ukraine, global warming, his two impeachments, “men in women’s sports” and “transgender for everyone.” The latest such fabrication, he wrote, is “the decimation, or destruction, of AI, commonly known as Artificial Intelligence.”
Trump said his administration “will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry” and that any “bad actors” in the AI sector could be addressed through “criminal and civil systems of justice.” He predicted AI would prove to be “the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful, possibly as much as 25% of our Country’s GDP” and said the United States is “leading China, and the rest of the World, and I intend to keep it that way.”
The post came after an earlier social-media message in which Trump questioned the term “artificial intelligence” — coined by American computer scientist John McCarthy in 1955 — and proposed alternatives: “Superior Intelligence (SI),” “Extreme Intelligence (EI)” or “Supreme Intelligence (SI).”
Earlier in the week, Trump had argued his administration had done enough to prevent risks of AI catastrophe. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades,” he wrote Monday, describing calls to slow AI development as part of a “SICK conspiracy” to benefit China.
Trump is scheduled to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping next Thursday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where competition between the United States and China in artificial intelligence is expected to be discussed.