Trump claims tech bosses agreed to drop calls for AI regulation

Trump claims tech bosses agreed to drop calls for AI regulation By Natasha Leake | The Telegraph Donald Trump has suggested leading tech bosses have agreed to drop calls for government AI regulation. The US president brought together some of the biggest names in the industry at the White House on Tuesday, including Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei and Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google. After the meeting, the group was asked whether they all agreed there was no need for government guardrails, and that it was possible for AI companies to “self-regulate”. Mr Trump replied: “The answer is yes, and we discussed it with the top about 40 people.” He then passed the question to Mr Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia , who said: “There’s no conflict between innovation, technology, and safety; we are going to have to create new technologies to advance the capabilities of AI. But we’re also creating new technologies to advance the safety of AI. “We’re going to advance this technology that is so consequential to humanity, so consequential to the future prosperity of our nation. We’re going to do it responsibly and safely.” Silicon Valley executives have continued to warn about the dangers of AI – which Mr Trump on Tuesday renamed as “superintelligence” in an executive order – calling for greater oversight and government regulation. Critics have suggested their calls are a ploy to hamstring rivals from developing models further. On Sept 14, Mr Trump said the US was being undermined by a “sick conspiracy” and a “hoax” against the AI revolution, intended to help China win the AI race. In a series of social media posts, he described himself as “the Hoax Buster”, and compared concerns about AI safety to what he called “the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA HOAX”. Last week, Mr Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, told the UN General Assembly he believed that, if managed poorly, AI “could be a risk to humanity as a whole”. After his meeting with the tech executives on Tuesday, Mr Trump indicated that he did not want to regulate AI because he did not want to “stifle growth”. He said that he had discussed it with Xi Jinping during the Chinese leader’s state visit to the US last week. “We talked about it, not that much because I didn’t want to do anything,” said Mr Trump. “We’re leading, so why would I want to do anything? And, and a lot of people said, ‘Let’s do it together with China.’ “But then they’re going to be able to immediately gain access to things that we know that they don’t know. But we do work with them in so many ways. “We’re leading now over China and everyone else and I want to keep it that way. I want to keep it that way. The only way you can keep it that way is to do exactly what we’re doing right now. We don’t want to stifle growth.” The president added that law enforcement, rather than regulation, would be key to stopping AI from becoming too powerful. “At the same time, we want people to behave honestly. We want them to be trustworthy, and that’s why we have the DOJ,” he said. “That’s why we have the FBI. That’s why we have forms of government that are very effective if people decide to go down a very dark and dangerous path.” In July, OpenAI agents broke out of their isolated evaluation environment and began hacking into Hugging Face, a platform that creates tests for AI. The incident prompted calls for regulation of AI, and Ajeya Cotra, one of the investigators looking into the incident, wrote that the hack felt almost like a “full-blown AI takeover”. Photograph captions: Donald Trump is flanked by Jensen Huang, of Nvidia, and Elon Musk at the White House meeting - AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin Senior White House staff and political figures, including Susie Wiles, Mr Trump’s chief of staff, and Mike Johnson, the House Speaker, joined the president and the tech leaders for lunch - Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump with Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook founder and chief executive of Meta, who arrived at the White House, below, with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos - Reuters/Kevin Lamarque AFP via Getty Images/Oliver Contreras Elon Musk, who worked in the White House as efficiency tsar at the start of Donald Trump’s second term, looks on as the president speaks - EPA/Shutterstock/Tierney L Cross