There’s a simple solution for AI companies that feel like their models are developing at a frightening speed: Hit the brakes.
That’s the advice Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, gave during an interview with Fox News Sunday.
“It’s very interesting that they talk about these issues, about how scared they are about potentially where the future is, and maybe they want to do a pause,” Kratsios said. “Our position is, if you do believe that you’re developing a technology that is unsafe or you don’t want it out into the world, you can just stop it.”
He added, “You don’t need someone to force you to do that.”
Kratsios pushed back against the notion that the US government needs to take explicit action for tech companies to take a breather.
“They just need to slow down if they feel that they need to do so,” Kratsios said. “I think the key thing to always remember is the US government has lots of tools in its toolkit to deal with these issues when they come up, and we’ve used them in the past.”
Ever since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, tech companies across the globe have become locked in a race to develop the most capable model. Doing so could mean dominating the market and securing steady profits, a huge win for whichever company comes out on top. OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are among the industry leaders.
Many Americans have expressed concerns that those tech companies are moving too fast and, in doing so, putting public safety at risk. A Pew Research Center survey published in August said over half of the respondents were more concerned than excited about using AI more in their daily lives. Potential job loss was among the top concerns associated with AI.
Critics have also pointed toward privacy and cybersecurity risks. In July, OpenAI agents breached its training parameters and hacked Hugging Face, another AI company. This month, a cybersecurity startup used Anthropic’s Claude to hack OpenAI’s codebase. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google’s Gemini had hacked three companies this spring.
AI leaders themselves have long expressed concern about the products they are raising hundreds of billions of dollars to build.
In a blog post earlier this month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the Hugging Face breach convinced him that the industry needs to take its foot off the pedal.
“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet,” Amodei wrote. He suggested placing independent safety monitors inside the frontier AI labs and called for more robust government regulation.
The blog post earned support from his industry peers, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, xAI Elon Musk, and Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis.
President Donald Trump, who has broadly supported expanding and accelerating AI development in the US, said on Saturday that his administration would not do anything that could “stifle” AI’s progress. He also announced a new AI Force to coordinate responses when AI goes off the rails.
The Trump administration supported the $500 billion Stargate Project, an initiative to expand AI infrastructure nationwide, and he signed an executive order to accelerate federal permitting for data center construction. He will host China’s leader, Xi Jinping, in Washington, D.C., this week to discuss AI and trade.
Kratsios told Fox News Sunday that it’s critical to have conversations about AI with China.
“The key thing that we want to talk to him about is avoiding shared risks, and that’s something that I think we can have a fruitful conversation on,” Kratsios said.
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