Lawmakers weigh in as AI regulation debate heats up

It's been decades, and we really haven't seen a regulation on social media. What makes you think that there is going to be some sort of consensus in Washington that can get something done to legislate regulation on AI? >> I think it is an idea whose time has come as the industry industry itself has recognized. Obviously not all of the industry. Zuckerberg has opposed any kind of mandatory regimen, but Anthropic and OpenAI and others in the industry, some of the scholars, all believe that we need this agency to protect against the rogue agents, but also against the kinds of misalignment and the anti-evaluation element. >> You can't go out and just start building an airplane without having to meet certain standards. You can't put a new vaccine in the market without going through amazing amounts of tests. We can devise and create a system and and work with industry. I get the US government is not smart enough to do this by itself. Let me be very clear, but we are I mean as difficult as the democracy is we need to work together now and and get to these these this point where we can have innovation and and grow this this this industry. How fast can we do it? Not fast enough. We should we should be working on it tomorrow. I mean and again this is one of those funny things that finally, I mean I've been working on these models for a while. Uh and these bills, these these acts. Uh we should have gotten this done two or three years ago. This is not something new that we're just hearing for the first time, but we heard it kind of off in the distance and we felt we didn't have to we had time to worry about it. All right, now we have that wake-up call that we got to start right away you know, working Republicans and Democrats with the White House, Congress and the White House working with industry so that we can have the common good and make sure again that we promote the innovation but at the same time maximize the security. >> What's happened over the last many months is that the the leaders of these AI platforms come into the speaker's office to for courtesy visits. Every time they have a new model or a new version coming out of their tech, they come to tell me about it. And they've all said, you know, there's also some danger here. Well, each of them have a different prescription on on what the safeguards, the guardrails, uh so to speak, should be and uh I have resisted the siren song to jump in and do these blanket moratoriums and all of this uh you know, hyperregulation because we cannot lose our edge to China. So, this is about striking the right balance. I think we've got to make sure we do this well. We need to keep America ahead in this you know, transformational technology but also do it in a safe way. But we have a broader obligation to the people and to safety and to ensuring that this is done right and well. Jensen said it well, I think a couple days ago. He said, um security and innovation are not mutually exclusive. You can do both. And when you push innovation, you can push innovation and and safety and security as well. And that's what we want to make sure is happening. There's There's three tracks as I understand it, you know, to summarize this in layman's terms of the tech. You got You've got the labs that are pushing the frontier on this. Then you have sort of the the monitoring of all this. And then you have the alignment with the standards that are being put in place. We have to make sure that all three of those tracks are being pursued simultaneously and that they don't go too far on the advancement and leave the safety protocols behind. >> I'm very pro AI long. I think there's going to be disruption in the short term. If we have an incident if, you know, again uh one of these models not only broke into Australia but had did something where they took over a water system. I'm not a doomer. I'm you know, I don't think we're at existential risk. But I do think we're at a risk of taking over a water system or a hospital or something that would frankly freak out Americans. I've never seen and my background is in technology and innovation that's as big as AI, much bigger than the internet, much bigger than my old industry wireless that has freaked people out more. And particularly worse is is the people who are most concerned about AI are young people. They should be the ones embracing, but that gets into the whole question about workforce disruption. >> These agents that have broken out of their sandboxes and done things that look, if this was a human behind it, there would have been lawsuits filed, there would have been prison time potentially for any of these things. What What do you do with that when it's an agent and how How do we track this down? Because it seems to me like there should be liability laws that already exist that could be used to go against these guys. >> Absolutely. No, I think you're 100% right. There are liability laws. But we actually need a Department of Justice that wants to enforce the law instead of suck up to Donald Trump. I guess I started to say earlier, somebody breaks into my house and rifles around and look, they don't get to say, "Oh, well, I didn't [clears throat] break in. I used my little remote bot to break in and steal your stuff." The answer is like hell, you're still the one who is responsible and you're still the one who will be held accountable under under criminal laws. And yet right now, nobody's even looking at an investigation of these guys because the Trump administration, Donald Trump has said these are his buds.