It has been a week since former Anthropic AI employee Jacob Coxon posted on social media that emerging technologies, if left unchecked, could trigger a human extinction event within 10 years.
In that time, Donald Trump, whose financial fortunes have reached new heights thanks in part to his stock trading on various A.I. companies, has taken the attitude that “all is well” and “nothing to worry about” boasting on Truth Social:
Arizona’s Congressional Democratic Delegation has taken a more urgent approach to the dangers of AI running amok, calling for Trump and Congressional Republicans to get off their Laissez Faire butts and face the issue before it is too late.
Representative Yassamin Ansari penned a letter to Mr. Trump, cosigned by over 40 House Democrats, including fellow Arizonan Adelita Grijalva, demanding he take action on AI regulation, writing:
“In the wake of recent alarming revelations by leading AI experts at Anthropic, OpenAI, and other companies, we write to you as members of Congress who maintain our dedication to preserving American leadership in critical and emerging technologies, but are nonetheless deeply concerned by emerging signs of highly capable frontier Artificial Intelligence and its ramifications. As AI rapidly advances in the U.S. and around the globe, your administration must immediately initiate dialogue with allies, and also competitors and adversaries, to engage in comprehensive and urgent negotiations regarding the future of AI. These much-needed negotiations will enhance our economic competitiveness while preserving global national security for generations to come.
True global security in the untested and fast-advancing field of AI requires stability, predictability, and strategic restraint. Without deliberate multilateral mechanisms for coordinated restraint and calculated risk reduction, the race by multibillion-dollar companies to deploy ever-more powerful models risks inadvertently triggering a global economic disruption, attacks on critical infrastructure, the spread of supercharged disease, dangerous military miscalculations, and other potentially devastating impacts for humanity.
We strongly urge your administration to lead a coordinated international effort to establish a global framework to guide the development of this technology and a shared vision for AI end-use — engaging our strongest allies, such as the European Union, as well as formidable global competitors, particularly the People’s Republic of China.
In these multilateral fora, the most immediate priorities should be:
- Engaging in direct, strategic stability talks with peers and competitor nations, particularly the PRC, to establish bilateral and multilateral communication channels and verification mechanisms aimed at preventing AI-driven escalation during geopolitical crises, similar to historic arms control risk-reduction frameworks conducted during the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
- Protecting and enhancing global cybersecurity capabilities alongside our allies to harden critical digital infrastructure against AI-driven threats, such as state-sponsored, cross-border, and complex cyberattacks.
- Establishing a clear universal consensus to prevent increased risks from specific domains that carry catastrophic risks, including nuclear or chemical weapons command-and-control systems, the production of biohazards and deadly viruses, or be granted autonomous military strike authorization.
- Partnering with and supporting international monitoring organizations to standardize and share safety testing and incident-reporting protocols for the next-generation of highly-capable AI models, ensuring that American developers are not undercut by bad actors operating under lower safety standards while also ensuring that all actors are engaged in the best practices, aligning AI safety standards across the world designed to keep us all safe.
Technology should work for society, not threaten us all. The United States led the world in revolutionary international frameworks for nuclear safety and aviation standards without sacrificing domestic strength. Likewise, we must lead with the creation of global rules of the road to prevent the proliferation of uncontrollable highly capable frontier AI. The results for not doing so could otherwise be catastrophic.
Thank you for your leadership and attention to this urgent matter. We look forward to working together to safeguard our nation’s technological future.”
Appearing on CNN, Ansari further expressed her concerns and Trump’s opportunity to lead should he take it, saying:
“Well, look, when you talk about this issue, you know, and the fact that we need to regulate AI urgently, given all of the calls from not just the top of these AI companies, but engineers and scientists and people like Dr. Hinton, who is considered the godfather of AI and has been working on this technology for years, they are warning us that we need to regulate immediately. But the response that we often hear is that, well, what about China? China is going to move ahead and will, you know, this is an AI arms race, and we need to win. You heard the president say, you know, we need to win this race.
But the truth of the matter is that whoever wins AI, AI actually wins. And that is because all of these experts are telling us and what we have seen from the horrifying Hugging Face incident and so many others is that ultimately AI is able to go rogue and go beyond human control. And so what we need here really is an international treaty.
We need the United States to lead an effort with China, with our allies to have global rules of the road for artificial intelligence and for frontier AI in particular. This is incredibly important. The truth also is that, you know, nobody in the world, no country, whether they’re a friend or foe will benefit from artificial super intelligence.
This is a technology that will go beyond human control and will impact all of us. Again, AI is not going to care if you speak English or if you speak Mandarin. It can threaten every single one of us.
So President Trump has a real opportunity to lead here. He will be meeting with Xi Jinping next week. It’s the UN General Assembly.
We’ve heard that there is also a meeting with Sam Altman in the books, but I think we need a global framework, just like we have with nuclear weapons. And so a large group of members of Congress are urging the president to take action. This should not be partisan and this should also not be.
It’s not just simply an American issue. It’s a global issue.”
Late last week, Representative Greg Stanton also sounded the alarm on the need for AI regulation, calling on House Republican leadership to come back into session and address the issue, saying:
“We should take the warnings of the leading investigators of AI very, very seriously. And what they told us is that there is a time period here. There is a window of time for Congress to take action in order to make sure that we don’t have the worst impacts of AI.
Look, we’re United States of America. We can lead on innovation and we can lead on safety. We’re the strongest economy on planet Earth and we have the strongest worker protection.
So safety and innovation are not the opposite of each other. We can and must do both. And that’s why we’re demanding Mike Johnson not send Congress home after this week until after the election.
They already canceled two weeks of votes, two weeks of Congress at the end of September and early October. They should bring us back to Congress. Let’s get together and let’s do something on AI safety because the consequences are incredibly serious.”
Reacting to Mr. Trump’s claim that the only thing necessary to safeguard the country from the dangers of AI is him, Senator Ruben Gallego wrote:
“If the only guardrail AI needs is a ‘strong and smart president,’ we’re doomed.
We’re talking about mitigating the risk of extinction from AI. This moment calls for immediate Congressional oversight and regulation. I’m pushing Senate leadership to form a bipartisan Select Committee on AI to get it done.”
Appearing yesterday, September 16, on ABC News 15, Senator Mark Kelly, who authored the AI for America Act last year, said:
“People have a right to be concerned. And it is the responsibility of the United States government, specifically the US Congress, to put in the guardrails to make sure that this technology doesn’t get out of control and do real harm to the country, to people, to communities.
I had a plan last year that I rolled out called AI for America, which is a roadmap for how we should deal with this. But there are upsides to AI, and there are certainly downsides. And we’ve got to make sure that this technology benefits most people and doesn’t harm them.
It shouldn’t be something where oligarchs, billionaires and big companies benefit at the expense of everybody else.
“There are things we can do and that we should do, and we need to act… The other CEOs of the frontier AI companies need to get on board with this. They can put in the guardrails themselves, but we can’t count on them to do that. And it’s the responsibility of the U.S. Senate and the House and the Administration.”
“We have to put some restrictions on these companies. The companies are starting to ask for these things. They want regulation. They want guardrails in place. We have to be able to mitigate for bad outcomes before they actually happen.”
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