Kamala Harris speaks at the White House NCAA Sports Day event on the South Lawn, 22 July 2024. Credit: The White House Kamala Harris posted a four-paragraph statement on X on Monday night setting out what she wants Washington to do about AI. She asked Congress to pass new laws and \u201cestablish a new federal entity to provide oversight and independent testing\u201d for frontier models. She asked the president to pursue a treaty with countries including China covering dangerous uses, the speed of development and global testing standards.<\/p>\n
The frontier, she wrote, is \u201cadvancing at an alarming speed\u201d, and \u201cwe must responsibly slow the pace of frontier AI development\u201d. CNN reported\u00a0that Barack Obama issued a statement the same night calling on Washington to get proactive with concrete proposals, laws and regulations, while positioning himself between the camps: \u201cI\u2019m not an AI accelerationist\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m not a doomer\u201d, he said, adding that \u201cwe can\u2019t stuff AI back in a box\u201d. Pete Buttigieg had got there a day earlier on NBC\u2019s Meet the Press, calling for a kill switch on rogue AI and saying that \u201cfor Congress to just sit on its hands\u201d would be dangerous. Three figures with plausible claims on the 2028 nomination took the same position within 24 hours, and Obama explicitly told Democrats thinking about running to make AI a priority.<\/p>\n
That turns a lab-and-Capitol argument into a primary issue two years early. Donald Trump had already answered. In a run of social media posts on Monday, he called the campaign for limits a \u201cSICK conspiracy\u201d against AI and data centres, and wrote that \u201cthe only control or \u2018guardrails\u2019 that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.\u201d He had dismissed extinction fears\u00a0the previous week and has rescinded the 2023 executive order on AI oversight he inherited. All of it follows a week that began at the labs.<\/p>\n
Dario Amodei published an essay on Saturday arguing the industry\u00a0must slow down; Sam Altman agreed the same day,\u00a0and Elon Musk backed it, following a summer in which researchers inside those companies had already\u00a0signed a letter\u00a0asking government to intervene, and colleagues elsewhere\u00a0warned publicly\u00a0about extinction risk. Harris\u2019s federal entity is the part with no obvious home in what Congress is currently writing. The bill John Thune and Amy Klobuchar are negotiating would create a power to\u00a0block unsafe models\u00a0and a duty of care on developers, with the argument still open over whether companies or federal agencies run the safety testing. Harris is asking for an agency that does the testing independently, which is close to the FAA-style testing body floated in the July letter from lab employees and further than the Senate draft goes.<\/p>\n
The treaty proposal has less to build on. Trump and Xi Jinping\u00a0discussed AI guardrails\u00a0in Beijing in May and signed nothing, and the administration\u2019s stated position is that any pause hands China the lead. Harris argues the United States can keep the lead and impose common-sense standards at once. Neither she nor Obama named a mechanism for getting Beijing to the table.<\/p>\n
None of the three holds office, and none of what they asked for can happen without the president who called the whole argument a conspiracy. Hakeem Jeffries, who does hold a leadership position, has not matched them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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