A brief history of AI executives calling for regulation

What happened

Over the past few days, a lot of people who stand to make a lot of money from AI all publicly agreed that it’s time to make everyone slow down before we lose control — including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and X CEO Elon Musk.

While this form of AI isn’t quite the same as self-replicating intelligence, Microsoft president Brad Smith opened the door to voluntary regulation in a speech at the Brookings Institution, saying, “We believe it’s important for governments in 2019 to start adopting laws to regulate this technology.

… We believe that the only way to protect against this race to the bottom is to build a floor of responsibility that supports healthy market competition. ” “[T]here is no question in my mind that artificial intelligence needs to be regulated. It is too important not to,” wrote Pichai in an editorial for the Financial Times.

” “Companies such as ours cannot just build promising new technology and let market forces decide how it will be used,” he added. Like with Microsoft a year earlier, these comments emerged around fears about AI facial recognition specifically.

“If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium,” the letter, published by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute and signed by Musk, among others, reads. Two weeks later, Musk announced he’d created his own new AI company. Two years later, he would use DOGE to dismantle chunks of the federal workforce instead of helping to regulate anything.

Brought before the US Senate for a series of AI hearings, Altman agreed that Congress should create a new agency to regulate artificial intelligence. “We believe that the benefits of the tools we have deployed so far vastly outweigh the risks,” he argued. ” In another hearing on May 25th, Anthropic’s CEO warned US senators that AI could help create bioweapons.

Why it matters

When people who profit from something declare that it’s dangerous and needs to be regulated, there’s always reason to be skeptical. But whatever their reason, this is far from the first time AI thought leaders have sounded the alarm.

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution prompted author Samuel Butler to warn about intelligent self-replicating machines replacing humans back in 1863 — and in his follow-up 1872 book Erewhon, he describes visiting a fictional society that has already regulated machines out of existence to avoid humanity’s collapse. ” Calls for intervention, too, aren’t new.

In 2000, Sun Microsystems cofounder and chief scientist Bill Joy wrote that self-replicating robots could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons, partly because they’re being developed “within the now-unchallenged system of global capitalism” rather than in tightly controlled government labs. ” But modern AI bigwigs warning that their investments should be controlled? That trend appears to have begun with Elon Musk, who invested earlier than most.

By the time Elon Musk told a gathering of US governors that they needed to regulate AI right away, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO already had skin in the game. He’d already invested $38 million in OpenAI, as well as stakes in at least two other AI companies, and he’d publicly spoken about the dangers of AI for three years.

“AI is a rare case where we need to be proactive about regulation instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’s too late,” Musk told a gathering of US governors at the July 2017 National Governors Association summer meeting. In March 2018, he added: “AI is far more dangerous than nukes.

” In the wake of Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica data scandal, the Meta founder suggested his company should be regulated — if it’s the “right” regulation. It was largely not about AI, but he did go there: In March 2019, he added that the internet needs a “more active role” for regulators.

What to watch

When OpenAI’s CEO was before Congress, we noted that the tone was friendly and they seemed to be trying to shape legislation together; here is an example of Microsoft trying to shape future regulation as well. One regulatory example: “New laws would require operators of these systems to build safety brakes into high-risk AI systems by design.