Push for AI regulation mounts as talk of AI’s ‘existential’ risks go mainstream

Summary

China’s top spy warns AI could pose a risk to the Communist Party. OpenAI is violating California’s new AI safety law, watch dog group says. Half of companies aren’t following their own AI governance policies, E&Y survey says. In the past few days, the reporter has heard a lot of people repeating that old saw—often wrongly attributed to Vladimir Lenin—about there being “weeks when decades happen.” It certainly seemed to be one of those weeks in AI. Concern about existential risk has been a strain of AI discourse for decades. After years in which both domestic AI regulation and efforts at some kind of international AI governance regime had mostly stalled, suddenly the air is electric with possibility. Their Fortune colleague Nick Lichtenberg had a good story on why the resignation jeremiad of former Anthropic and OpenAI safety researcher Jacob Coxon had such impact when previous warnings, often from much higher-profile individuals, did not.

After Alyson’s interview, Amodei put out a blog post also calling for a coordinated slowdown or pause among frontier labs in democratic countries. Bernie Sanders, call for an outright ban on the development of “artificial superintelligence” and mandate that U.S. AI companies pause current research until safety techniques improve. Amy Klobuchar, would impose a duty on AI companies to prevent catastrophic harms. Meanwhile, a group of 70 U.K. parliamentarians signed an open letter calling for the British government to ban the creation of artificial superintelligence and work on an international AI treaty.