AI Now, CFR press for enforceable AI rules before Trump-Xi

On September 11, four AI governance specialists convened at the Johns Hopkins SAIS Institute for America, China, and the Future of Global Affairs to argue that the frame Washington keeps reaching for, a race with China, is the wrong frame heading into a Trump-Xi summit.

'By framing the whole conversation as a race,' Jack Shanahan, a retired Air Force officer now at the Center for a New American Security, said, 'everybody immediately thinks there's a tape at the end.' The event, 'Getting Tech Right: US China Policy for a New Era,' was reported by Tech Policy Press and moderated by its editor Justin Hendrix.

Amba Kak, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute, was blunt about what she wanted in place of voluntary commitments. 'It looks like rules. It looks like liability. It looks like the hard, the concrete enforceable rules,' she said.

Kat Duffy, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, pointed at the domestic transparency gap. 'Americans don't know who's funding what, where that money is coming from, nor frankly, do many of the innovators know who is funding them,' she said. She also described 'unprecedented amounts of agreement across evangelical Christians and liberal progressives' in current AI polling.

Miro Plueckebaum of the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative focused on the mechanics of trusting anyone else to comply with anything. The question, he said, is how to 'verify whether or not actors have, for example, actually paused, but at what point we ought to pause and for how long.' He added that 'Chinese companies are starting to reach out to international AI safety researchers asking for their help in complying with these standards.'

Two AI researchers on our Who's Who list circulated the panel writeup.