Lina Khan has some advice for AI companies attempting to self-regulate the advancing tech.
The former Federal Trade Commission chair said doing so would be a fool’s errand during an interview on ABC’s “This Week.”
“We’ve seen that self-regulation efforts by Big Tech have been a proven failure,” Khan said on Sunday. “We need to remember what happened a decade ago.”
She referenced Big Tech companies that tried to self-regulate in the early days of social media.
“We’ve seen just innumerable harms come from the unchecked nomination of these Big Tech companies, and so now, as we face new horizons with these advanced AI systems, it would be an enormous mistake to repeat that playbook,” Khan said.
Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, major players in the tech industry have become caught in a global race to develop their own systems. Companies like Microsoft, Google, and Meta have invested heavily in their products in hopes of dominating the global market. However, the speed of AI advancement has prompted calls from politicians, advocates, and even some tech leaders for guardrails.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on his industry peers to pace the development of frontier AI systems last month. In a blog post, he said the “most effective” method would involve regulation that targets US frontier AI companies. His essay drew support from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk.
The Trump administration has avoided implementing regulations on the AI industry. Last week, President Donald Trump said tech leaders had signed an AI safety agreement to regulate themselves.
Although overarching regulation is still up in the air, Khan said there are already laws in place to address issues in the AI industry.
“I think one thing that’s especially odd about this moment is that you’re hearing from these executives that they are effectively developing malfunctioning products, AI systems that are engaging in repeated hacks of the servers of other companies, of the servers of other governments, and yet that they are somehow helpless as to do anything serious about it,” she said.
A spattering of cybersecurity incidents has cast a harsh glare on AI companies. OpenAI agents hacked another AI company, Hugging Face, in July. In September, an AI startup’s research team used Claude to hack into OpenAI’s codebase, and The Wall Street Journal reported that Google’s Gemini had hacked three companies in the spring. Recently, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said an OpenAI agent hacked into a government website this summer.
In a blog post, OpenAI said it should have shared the preliminary findings with Australia’s government sooner and kept agencies abreast of developments.
During her interview, Khan told “This Week” that the idea that adopting new technologies exempts companies from current laws is “totally laughable.”
“I think when you have a pattern of these agents engaging in this type of dangerous behavior, and you still have these companies developing in the same way, not putting the full guardrails in place, I think that starts to raise very serious questions,” Khan said.
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