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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Winna Liu. I write the game Connections, one of the puzzles from New York Times games. And I love horror movies. I love my dog. And I love trying to trick you. I'm Tracy Bennett. I get to pick the wordle word every day, which is not as easy as it sounds. The fun fact about me is that I am descended from a witch who was put on trial in Salem.
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Hey, it's Michael. Before we start the show, we want to let you know that our colleague, Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic and host of the Times podcast Cannonball, Wesley Morris, is going to be hosting a live event next week at the Tribeca Festival. Wesley will be talking to the actress and activist Cynthia Nixon.
They'll be having a conversation about great works of art about New York, which makes sense given Nixon's starring role in arguably one of them, Sex and the City. It promises to be a very fun and very smart evening. The show is Friday, June 12th at 6 p.m., and you can get your tickets at tribecafilm.com slash audio. That's tribecafilm.com slash audio. Okay, here's today's show.
From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barrow. This is The Daily. Today... the story of how President Trump begrudgingly accepted that the most transformational technology of our time, artificial intelligence, requires government oversight.
My colleague, Tripp Mikkel, takes us inside the dramatic White House battle that has played out over the past few weeks and previews the coming fight over just how far federal regulation of AI should go. It's Thursday, June 4th. Tripp, welcome back to The Daily. Thanks so much for having me. I want you to explain exactly what President Trump did a few days ago on Tuesday.
On Tuesday morning, as I was in the middle of my commute, I was bombarded with text messages saying that President Trump had, to many people's surprise, signed an executive order to regulate artificial intelligence. And it gives the government, for the first time really under the Trump administration, oversight over AI models. Hmm.
This is a big change for an administration that has had an entirely hands-off approach to regulating the tech industry and the companies that are pushing artificial intelligence forward. What the government has done is said that AI companies will share...
their models voluntarily with the government about 30 days before they're released publicly so that the government can review the models and figure out if there are any software vulnerabilities that they could attack. And then that would allow the government to patch those vulnerabilities and prevent a cyber attack by a foreign adversary or just a bad actor.
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Chapter 2: What prompted President Trump to sign an executive order on AI regulation?
And what they wind up coming up with is this idea of an up to 90-day window when they could review artificial intelligence models and assess whether or not those models are capable of finding software vulnerabilities.
In essence, it wouldn't tell tech companies what they can't do, but it would allow the government to absorb information about what their technology can do so that the government is prepared for that and can help
other key groups like banks and utilities also be prepared for those risks and so a draft of the executive order is written the administration schedules a signing ceremony in the oval office on thursday may 21st and they begin to ask and invite chief executives to come to washington to be there for this event and in the run-up to that event a couple of things happened
Joining me now is White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett. Kevin, it's great to have you this morning. Welcome.
Good to be here. One, Kevin Hassett, the head of the National Economic Council, goes on Fox TV.
We're studying possibly an executive order to give a clear roadmap to everybody about how future AIs that also potentially create vulnerabilities should go through a process so that they're released into the wild after they've been proven safe, just like an FDA drug.
And describes the process that they're considering as something akin to what the FDA does for drug approvals.
An FDA for AI? That would vet. You heard that correct, folks.
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Chapter 3: How did the White House battle over AI regulation unfold?
That would vet new models for safety. The thing we've been talking about not doing here. The thing.
This freaks out Silicon Valley constituents and leads to real worry that the administration's going to slow down the development of artificial intelligence and basically just slam the brakes on it. In the same way that it's like really hard to get a new drug out the door, they fear that it's going to be really hard to get new artificial intelligence models out the door.
And Thursday morning rolls around and it's time for President Trump to gear up to sign this executive order. And that morning, he begins to get skeptical about it and say, what is this on my calendar? And he calls, he starts calling tech executives and saying, hey, what do you think of this?
And so he speaks to a number of tech executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Andreessen, the venture capitalist who has a tremendous amount of influence on the White House, and most importantly, David Sachs. And David Sachs tells him directly, don't sign this. This is a bad idea. Wow. Within a few hours of that, the president's on TV doing another event.
Why has today's executive order on AI been postponed?
Because I didn't like certain aspects of it. I postponed it. I think it gets in the way of, you know, we're leading China, we're leading everybody, and I don't want to do anything that's going to get in the way of...
And he says that he's canceling the executive order signing event because he's concerned that it's going to create rules that slow down the industry.
I really thought that could have been a blocker, and I want to make sure that it's not. This feels like a pretty decisive victory for the AI industry and for the David Sachs faction of those advising the president. But we know that it's a temporary victory because Trump does end up signing some version of an executive order.
So after he changes his mind and cancels the first one, what makes him want to sign it all over again?
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of the new AI oversight for tech companies?
because he's really concerned that they're going to sell out the American public, enrich themselves, and they're going to do it without any transparency or any accountability.
I think that artificial intelligence that we have to have even more than regulation. I think we need something like a Geneva Treaty or some sort of arms treaty. This thing is very dangerous, very dangerous.
And that's where he wants the government to step in and provide some rules for the road. And I am more of a hardliner on this than anything else I've ever been a hardliner on.
He hasn't been real explicit about what those rules should be, but he's definitely channeled what he believes is the anger building of working class people and the uneasiness of working class people who are seeing this big transformative technology barreling down the tracks at them and feeling like nobody's in the engine room steering the trains.
Right, and he ultimately worries that these AI broligarchs are going to force Trump to sell out his own base because Bannon was at the heart of creating the Trump political message that appealed so powerfully to that forgotten American worker.
Exactly. And the interesting thing about this is it's not just an economic argument that's gotten momentum within the MAGA base. There's also a moral argument that's been building as well. I stumbled upon this by talking to a pastor in Texas, you know. in a conversation with this pastor, I was like, why did you become part of the AI opposition movement?
And he started doing it because he met with a parishioner who told him a story about a friend whose marriage was on the rocks because he was having a relationship with an AI companion and it had completely destroyed and gutted the relationship he had with his wife. You know, and this pastor is concerned about how many other people might wind up in the same situation in the future.
Right. Basically, AI as a road to perdition, a kind of moral rot.
Right. And like what stress and strain does this put on kind of the moral fabric of America? And this isn't an isolated thing. There were more than three dozen pastors who signed on to a letter with Steve Bannon urging the Trump administration to actually sign this executive order that we spent time talking about.
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Chapter 5: Why did Trump's administration initially resist regulating AI?
Let's get it done.
That's about as far as you can possibly imagine from the president's baby step of give us 30 days to evaluate the safety of something before it goes out in the world voluntarily. This would be the government owning, controlling the industry night and day.
Yeah, it's a big radical leap from where the president is at the moment.
And suffice it to say, the AI industry, not a fan of this proposal?
It was largely met with shock and Silicon Valley and ridicule from people who think it's basically unacceptable socialism.
At this point, given how much of a desire we can see on both sides of the populist wings of the parties for regulation of AI... What is the industry actually willing to accept at the moment?
The industry, at the same time these conversations are happening, seems to be recognizing that it has a big problem with the American public at the moment, that it's got a trust deficit. I mean, that's pretty clear based on the polling data that's been coming out, based on the rise in AI opposition.
And then based on like a very violent act that happened here in San Francisco, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at Sam Altman's home, Sam Altman being the CEO of OpenAI. And that was a bit of a wake up call for everybody in terms of making people recognize that developing this technology without any rules also has risks for the companies who are pushing it forward.
And so what you've seen in the wake of the executive order And we're just talking like days, Michael, like this is just a few days later. OpenAI came out on Wednesday with its own post encouraging Congress to sit down and adopt more rigorous rules for the artificial intelligence industry. Now, this is a company that has largely opposed rules up until this point.
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