Two days after President Joe Biden signed a sweeping executive order on artificial intelligence last year, Vice President Kamala Harris took the shaky document to a global AI summit, telling an international audience what sets the U.S. apart in its approach to AI safety.
At an event designed to address the potential catastrophes posed by futuristic forms of AI, Harris made waves by focusing on current concerns — and the need to codify protections quickly without stifling innovation.
“When a senior is kicked off their health plan because of a faulty AI algorithm, isn’t that existential for them?” Harris told a crowd in London last November. Isn’t that existential for her?”
Now, she is running for president and her main opponent, former President Donald Trump, has said he wants to “cancel” Biden’s order. Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, also brings his own views on AI, which are influenced by his ties to some Silicon Valley figures pushing to limit AI regulation.
The growing visibility of AI in everyday life has made it a popular topic of discussion, but has not yet elevated it to a top concern for American voters. But this could be the first presidential election in which candidates are crafting competing visions for how to guide American leadership on rapidly developing technology.
Here are the AI candidate records:
Biden signed his AI executive order last October 30, and soon after Trump signaled on the campaign trail that, if re-elected, he would eliminate it. His promise was honored on the platform of this month’s Republican National Convention.
“We will revoke Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that impedes AI innovation and imposes radical leftist ideas on the development of this technology,” says Trump’s platform. “In its place, Republicans support the development of AI rooted in free speech and human flourishing.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for more details.
trump I didn’t spend much time talking about AI during his four years as president, although in 2019 he became the first to sign a executive order on AI. He directed federal agencies to prioritize research and development in the area.
Before that, technology experts had been pushing the Trump-era White House for a stronger AI strategy that matched what other countries were looking for. In 2017, not long before Google quietly unveiled a research breakthrough that helped lay the foundation for the technology now known as generative AI, then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin put aside concerns about AI displacing jobs, saying that prospect was so far in the future that it was “not even on my radar screen.”
That perspective later changed, with Trump’s top technology adviser telling business leaders in 2018 that AI-powered job displacement is “inevitable” and that “we can’t stand by and wait for the market to eventually solve the problem.” The 2019 order called on federal agencies to “protect civil liberties, privacy, and American values” in applying AI technologies and to help workers acquire relevant skills.
Trump also in the last weeks of his administration signed an executive order promoting the use of “trustworthy” AI in the federal government. These policies have been transferred to the Biden administration.
The debut of ChatGPT almost halfway through Biden’s presidential term has made it impossible for politicians to ignore AI. Within months, Harris was summoning the chiefs from Google, Microsoft and other technology companies at the White House, a first step on a path that has seen leading developers agree to voluntary commitments to ensure their technology does not put people’s rights and safety at risk.
Then came Biden’s AI order, which used Korean War-era national security powers to examine high-risk commercial AI systems, but was primarily aimed at safeguarding the government’s use of the technology and establishing standards that could promote commercial adoption. Unlike the European Union, however, the US does not yet have broad rules on AI – something that would require Congressional approval.
Harris already brings to the White House a deep understanding of Silicon Valley, having grown up and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area and later served as attorney general of California, where she established relationships with some technology leaders, said Alondra Nelson, a former -director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Even before ChatGPT, Nelson led White House efforts to craft a plan for an AI “bill of rights” to protect against the potential harms of the technology. But it was in her speech at the Global AI Security Summit in London that Harris brought all these topics together and “articulated to the world what the American AI strategy was,” Nelson said.
Harris said she and Biden “reject the false choice that suggests we can either protect the public or promote innovation.” And while she acknowledged the need to consider existential threats to humanity, Harris emphasized “the full spectrum of AI risk.”
“She kind of opened up the conversation about the potential risks and harms of AI,” Nelson said.
Trump’s choice of former venture capitalist Vance as his running mate added a new element to the differences between the campaigns. So have recent endorsements of Trump from a group of AI-focused tech leaders, including Elon Musk and venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
Vance acknowledged some harmful applications of AI, but said at a Senate hearing in July that he worries the concern is justifying “some preemptive attempts at overregulation that would frankly entrench the technology incumbents that we already have.”
Andreessen, who sits on the board of Meta Platforms, criticized a provision in Biden’s order that requires government scrutiny of the most powerful and ostensibly risky AI systems if they can perform a certain number of mathematical calculations per second.
In a podcast with business partner Horowitz explaining his support for Trump, Andreessen said he was concerned about “the idea that we are deliberately going to harm ourselves through onerous regulations while the rest of the world lights up about this, and while China lights up about this.” .”
Horowitz read aloud the RNC’s call to revoke Biden’s order, saying “that sounds like a good plan to me” and noting that he and Andreessen discussed the proposals with Trump at dinner.
Trump met with another group of VCs in a video podcast in June, sharing his view that leading AI will require enormous amounts of electricity — a perspective he shared again on stage at the RNC, where he said it will require “the double the electricity that is now available in our country.” It was his only mention of AI in the 92-minute speech.
Much remains unknown, including the extent to which Harris or the Trump-Vance ticket will listen to the opinions of their competing Silicon Valley-supporting wings.
While rhetorical differences are sharpening, “there are a lot of similarities” between how the Trump and Biden administrations have approached AI policy, said Aaron Cooper, senior vice president of global policy at BSA The Software Alliance, which advocates for software companies. , including Microsoft.
Voters still haven’t heard many details about how a Harris administration or a second Trump administration would change that.
“What we will continue to see as technology develops and as new questions arise, regardless of who is in the White House, they will be looking at how we can make the most of AI while at the same time reducing most of the damage,” Cooper said. . “This seems obvious, but it is not an easy calculation.”
