Letters from an American - Asking the U.S. Government to Regulate AI

Starting point is 00:00:06 Hello, this is Michael Moss. Heather Cox Richardson is unable to read the letter today, so I will be reading it in her place. September 13, 26. On Saturday, September 12th, Dario Amo Day, the chief executive officer of the Artificial Intelligence Company Anthropic, published a 3,800-word essay calling for AI companies to slow down their improvement of AI models. Amode expressed concern that AI models are themselves pushing advances faster than engineers can understand them. He noted that July's Open AI Hugging Face incident, in which programs designed to hack into systems found weaknesses that permitted them to escape the sandbox, in which designers were testing them for about a week before anyone noticed, had,

Starting point is 00:01:02 luckily, been relatively harmless, but warned that, in my opinion, a sports, swarm that possessed greater capabilities, but a similar level of misalignment, could have caused catastrophic damage. Within a year, he warned, such a swarm could take over the entire internet, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. In his essay, Amodei called for AI companies to commit to giving embedded third-party evaluators access to their work, rather like the regulatory supervisors in banking. He called for AI companies in democratic countries to establish safety standards and limit their rate of progress. And he called for the U.S. and other Democratic governments to attempt to coordinate with authoritarian governments to the extent this is possible,

Starting point is 00:01:56 while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance. Today on Face the Nation, Amm O'Day explained to host Joe Link, Ken. My view here is it has always been very strange that this technology is being built by a private company. People ask me that question all the time. Why isn't this being built by government? And the strangest thing about it is, I agree with them. I'm uncomfortable. Government didn't build this technology.

Starting point is 00:02:27 This company, this technology came from the private sector. And we, Anthropic, and I would hope other companies have done everything we can, to try to have legitimate oversight mechanisms. I think the government and the public need to have a stake, and this is why we've supported regulation of the technology. Regulation constrains the private companies. Regulation allows the public and its elected representatives to have a say, and limits what the private companies can do.

Starting point is 00:03:00 Ask if he would be willing to give technology itself to the government. Amodei answered that, he might be willing to give it to the right combination of governments. I want to be very clear about this, he said. I am concerned that one single government could abuse this technology just as easily as a single company could. But I think a combination of democratically elected governments, I don't know about handover,

Starting point is 00:03:27 but some kind of oversight, some kind of joint governance. Again, that would be the work of years. But I wonder if that's a direction we need to, going. As Mike Isaac of the New York Times noted, Amode's call came days after an anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigned, posting on social media that neither open AI nor anthropic was acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. They are, he said, building superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight and acquire real power and resources.

Starting point is 00:04:13 The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade, Coxon said. He claimed that people at Open Eye might not yet realize what they're constructing, while those that Anthropic do understand but believe they are locked in a race to get their first. They believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk. Critics are skeptical, suggesting that AI leaders are hyping their product to make it appear more valuable than it really is. There was widespread concern that the mass of spending on AI infrastructure, like data

Starting point is 00:04:51 centers and chips, might not deliver the revenue and profits that would justify such spending. In June, Kate Brennan, Associate Director of Independent Research Institute, AI Now, told Amy Piki of CBS News, the returns are not coming in, and the claims that are being made in terms of efficiency or productivity numbers are not netting out. Others wonder if Ammo Day's public concerns aren't designed to get the government to regulate AI in such a way that it creates a framework that would make it harder for smaller companies to break into the market. Still, Kate Conger of the New York Times noted last week that in July, more than 1,300 employees from Anthropic, Open AI, Meta, and Google's

Starting point is 00:05:41 Deep Mind, all leading AI companies, signed an open letter asking the U.S. government to regulate AI to slow down its development. Conger also notes that in August, more than 100 tech companies offered their models to hospitals and infrastructure systems to enable them to guard against cyber attacks powered by AI. After Amodei's essay appeared, Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of Open AI, Elon Musk, who has been increasing spending on AI through his SpaceX rocket company, and Demi's Hussabis, chair of Google Deep Mind, all posted their support for slowing down the pace of AI improvements. On October 30, 2023, President Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14110, calling for safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial

Starting point is 00:06:41 intelligence. The document said AI must be safe and secure. It called for the promotion of responsible innovation, competition, and collaboration, and specified that AI must engage U.S. workers and advance equity and civil rights as well as privacy and civil liberties. The development of AI must protect consumers, it said, and the government must make sure the technology is deployed responsibly. Revoking this executive order was one of the first things Trump did on January 20, 2025. Published in the official register on January 23, Trump's order, removing barriers to American leadership in artificial intelligence, called for reviewing all policies, directives, regulations, orders, and other actions taken, under Biden's

Starting point is 00:07:39 order, and suspending, revising, or rescinding them. We must, the order said, develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas. During his second term, Trump and his sons have invested heavily in companies tied to the AI boom. Trump has called AI data centers the oil of the next 50 years and says they are developing wealth and investment to communities in the U.S. In July, he insisted that data centers are cash cows, creating taxes and jobs that amount to liquid gold. But the American people disagree. A U-Gov poll from late August show that only 24% of Americans think the construction of data centers is a good thing, while twice that number, 47% say it's bad.

Starting point is 00:08:37 A majority of Americans, 61% don't want one in their town. In response to their growing unpopularity, the administration is seeking to exempt data centers from having to notify the public about how much air pollution they will release. As Katzakruski, Violet Jira, and Natasha Tiku of the Washington Post reported, when asked today about the calls to slow down the development of AI models, Trump dismissed them, saying that the U.S. needed to stay ahead of China. He brushed off the warnings calling for the slower pace coming from the industry's leaders.

Starting point is 00:09:17 I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up, that shouldn't be bringing it up, Trump told reporters. And they're bringing up things that won't happen. David Sachs, the venture capitalist who heads the president's Council of Advisers on Space and Technology, accused the AI leaders of trying to avoid massive product liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyber attack. A Wall Street Journal article today by Richard Rubin and Justin Layhart offered a different perspective on the fight over regulating AI. In a piece about the growing U.S. debt, they note that the Trump administration insists it can overcome the rising deficits its mounting and the debt that

Starting point is 00:10:05 has recently hit 100% of the nation's gross domestic product and topped $40 trillion through growth. The idea that the U.S. could sustain high spending with low taxes by growing its way out of debt has been a driving force in the Republican Party since the 1980s. But as Ruben and Layhart note, the U.S. has not had to sustain 3% growth such a scenario requires since the 1990s, when companies were adopting computers and baby boomers were at their peak employment. During those years, under President Bill Clinton, the U.S. wiped out its deficit. But then President George W. Bush pushed through another big tax cut and launched two unfunded wars, and both deficits and debt climbed again. By this century, the author's note,

Starting point is 00:11:02 the conditions of the 1990s were reversed. Baby boomers are retiring, and productivity is slowing. And yet Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told an audience at Southern Methodist's university last week that he expects to see 3% growth again at the end of the war on Iran. The underlying economy is very, very strong, he said, and I think re-accelerating. This expected growth seems to be what's behind the administration's faith that it can continue to cut taxes while dramatically increasing spending on the military and the Department of Homeland Security. Last week, Ruben and Layhart note, Trump told Fox News Channel,

Starting point is 00:11:49 we're going to take care of the $40 trillion over a period of time through growth. We're growing at a faster rate than we've ever grown before. Whether the U.S. is not, in fact, growing at a record pace, growth during Trump's second term has sat at 1.9%. It appears the administration may be looking at a giant, boost in productivity, led by AI, as its Hail Mary Pass. Letters from an American was written by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts.

Starting point is 00:12:33 Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.

Letters from an American - Asking the U.S. Government to Regulate AI

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