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Washington is taking on the challenge of controlling AI

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The fireworks that usually go off when technology executives testify before Congress were conspicuously absent during yesterday’s Senate hearing on artificial intelligence. Instead, lawmakers questioned Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, for three hours in what appeared to be a sincere effort to understand the growing importance and dangers of artificial intelligence.

The central question in the discussion was how Washington should regulate AI — and, perhaps surprisingly, Altman and lawmakers from both sides agreed more than they disagreed. (Another unexpected lump: Altman says he has no stock in the sensationally growing AI company, stunning Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana.)

The biggest surprise: consensus on the creation of a new AI agency. Altman proposed creating a new government agency that issues licenses to develop large-scale AI models, safety regulations, and tests that AI models must pass before they are released to the public.

Even some Republicans, who usually shy away from expanding the federal government, appeared on board. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham compared AI to a nuclear reactor that needs an operating license and regular testing. When Christina Montgomery, IBM’s Chief Privacy and Trust Officer and another witness, suggested that a new agency was unnecessary, Graham pushed back“I don’t see how you could say we don’t need an agency to deal with the most transformative technology, perhaps ever,” he said.

Witnesses and lawmakers said other limits were needed. Altman and Montgomery said users should have the option to opt out of their data being used to train AI services. Meanwhile, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, expressed concern over who owns the computer-generated material that AI models create after being trained on copyrighted data.

And Montgomery added that consumers must be notified every time they interact with a chatbot. “No one should be tricked into interacting with an AI system anywhere,” she said.

Legislators were eager to avoid repeating past mistakes, including what they said was a failure to rein in tech giants like Facebook. “Congress didn’t make the cut on social media,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and the chair of the Senate panel that organized the hearing.

But skeptics worry that Washington will again miss important nuances when creating new regulations. Sarah Myers West of the AI ​​Now Institute, a center for policy research, told The Times that Altman’s proposals didn’t address how the technology was used in law enforcement — or put speed limits on how quickly Silicon Valley developed new products.

The latter may be a hard sell for some lawmakers: Delaware Democrat Senator Chris Coons said China was working on products that “enhance the core values ​​of the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese system,” and suggested that U.S. industry should serve as a counterweight to it.

It’s unclear whether Altman’s collaborative approach will save the AI ​​industry from a sting in Washington. Recall that some cryptocurrency executives have also appealed to Congress and regulatory bodies to create and clarify rules for their companies, only to see the SEC take a hard line.

Work in Congress continues. A less prominent Senate hearing yesterday weighed how government agencies should use AIwhile a House Judiciary subcommittee will hold a hearing today AI and copyright.

BlackRock will require employees to go to the office four days a week. The investment management giant new policy, up three days a week, comes as many Wall Street firms push to return to prepandemic work patterns. But the hybrid model still seems to be going strong offices remain half empty.

US prosecutors accuse a former Apple employee of stealing trade secrets. An indictment accused Weibao Wang of taking thousands of documents — including those related to the tech giant’s work on autonomous vehicles — while also working for a rival’s U.S.-based subsidiary headquartered in China. It is one of the first prosecutions by a task force focused on protecting critical US technologies.

The Florida government plans to take Wall Street firms to court. Lawmakers yesterday introduced a bill to Governor Ron DeSantis that would give the Florida State Board of Administration, which he oversees, an additional $18 billion in state pension money in alternative investments such as hedge funds and private equity. That may raise the question of whether DeSantis receive campaign contributions of financial managers.

EU member states are adopting the most comprehensive crypto regulation in the world to date. The rules require companies involved in issuing, trading or managing crypto assets in the bloc of 27 countries, obtain a permit as early as 2024. From 2026, the names of senders and beneficiaries must be disclosed in crypto transactions. The move could pressure other countries, including the United States, to adopt similar rules to regulate the industry.

Markets looked volatile this morning as warnings about Washington’s debt ceiling deadlock weighed on investors.

To almost no one’s surprise, the negotiators failed to reach a deal yesterday. Speaker Kevin McCarthy suggested a deal could still be reached “by the end of the week,” but Majority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer said bipartisan support would be needed. Still, both parties agreed that a US bankruptcy was out of the question.

Companies are increasingly concerned. More than 140 leaders of major companies, including Goldman Sachs and Pfizer, wrote an open letter to Congress warning of the “disastrous consequences” of bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, some Senate Democrats wonder if McCarthy can unite his caucus to close a deal. They fear that House Republicans will not bow to their demand for significant spending cuts to tackle the country’s $31.4 trillion in debt.

The debt ceiling stalemate is a much bigger threat to the economy than debt, argues Stephanie Kelton, professor of economics at Stony Brook University. The debt limit debate, she told DealBook, is “scarier” than in the past, though she still hopes an agreement will be reached.

US debt is fundamental not a problem, argues Kelton. That claim is rooted in its embrace of modern monetary theory, which essentially states that a government’s debt is not a problem if it can print its own currency. In other words, the United States should spend a lot on social programs because it can easily pay off its own debts and never go bankrupt. (The idea has been hotly contested.)

It’s a message that has won the support of progressive lawmakers such as Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That could make an adherence to MMT a political factor in the fight against the debt ceiling: lawmakers like Ocasio-Cortez warned President Biden not agreeing to Republican demands to cut government spending and that doing so could risk a backlash from his left flank.

— Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor. When asked by The Wall Street Journal why he received approximately $270,000 from an account linked to Jeffrey EpsteinChomsky said the money was part of an effort to rearrange his finances and was not about “one penny” from the convicted sex offender.

Elon Musk sat down for one yesterday long interview with CNBC after Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting, ostensibly to discuss electric car business.

Instead, the billionaire pushed for often controversial opinions on a wide variety of topics — and refused to back down.

Musk defended his tweets, even though they cost him money. In recent days, the tech mogul has been criticized for comparing George Soros to Magneto, the once “X-Men” villain, and for weigh in on whether the man accused of being behind a mass shooting at a mall in the Dallas area supported Nazi ideology.

“I’ll say what I want, and if it results in me losing money, so be it,” Musk said.

That approach could make life difficult for Twitter’s new chief. Linda Yaccarino was hired to help the social network’s embattled advertising business recover after it was hit by both a slump in digital advertising and advertisers’ reluctance to layoffs and changes to Musk’s content moderation.

Other highlights from the interview:

  • The billionaire once again mocked remote work, calling it “morally wrongand accuse higher-paid knowledge workers—the “laptop classes,” in his words—of insisting while frontline workers still have to show up in person.

  • Musk said Twitter’s finances were dismal from day 1, claiming the company only had $1 billion in the bank when he took over last fall, burning $3 billion a year.

  • Tesla faces a difficult 12 months ahead, with challenges such as high interest rates and consumers spending less. But he praised the company’s forthcoming Cybertruck.

  • Musk also shared his concern that the Fed would be too slow in cutting interest rates; questioned whether there was fraud in the 2020 election, although he admitted it was not stolen; and said he was no longer friends with Google co-founder Larry Page over disagreements over the dangers of artificial intelligence.

The Times has launched a new iOS audio journalism app featuring our podcasts, stories from our journalists, columnists and critics on business, politics, technology and more. Now available to Times news subscribers, the app can be downloaded here.

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