Global: Biden and Harris address AI regulation with BigTech CEOs

The President and Vice President, Kamala Harris, spoke with Alphabet Google’s Sundar Pichai, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Athropic’s Dario Amodei alongside other White House executives and administration officials.

Harris expressed concern over the widespread use of AI, threatening security, privacy, and civil rights. As leaders in their field, the CEOs hold a responsibility to protect their users and ensure the safety of their services, Harris explained.

After the global boom of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, AI use has dominated headlines and caused increasing concerns around privacy and security. AI chatbots are capable of writing essays, messages, resumes, emails, replicating voices, and manufacturing images among numerous other possibilities. A large concern is how AI can force people out of their jobs and invade their privacy.

After the meeting, Altman told reporters “we’re surprisingly on the same page on what needs to happen.”

Several of the companies at the meeting will participate in a public examination of their AI operations, including Anthropic, Google, Hugging Face, NVIDIA Corp, OpenAI, and Stability AI.

The move demonstrates that the Biden Administration is willing to support new AI regulations and will enforce chief executives to ensure compliance that safeguards users. The Biden Administration announced that it has invested $140 million into the National Science Foundation to launch seven new institutes for AI research and announced a plan for the federal government to release AI policy guidelines.

In 2022, the administration’s Office of Science and Technology Policy launched a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights to guide AI systems to protect the American public. The document addressed how AI operations should be safe and effective, not have discriminatory algorithms, include data privacy policies, provide notice and explanation of processes to the user, and offer alternative options to those who want to opt out. The blueprint cites financial services as a critical resource or service, and that in sensitive domains (such as finance), “your data and related inferences should only be used for necessary functions, and you should be protected by ethical review and use prohibitions.”

In February this year, Biden signed an executive order to eliminate bias in AI use, and has also released an AI risk management framework.