An alliance of tech giants, startups and venture capitalists are spending millions to convince Washington that fears of an AI apocalypse are overblown. So far, it’s working.
“What we don’t want to have happen is have development occur outside of the United States,” Sen.’s AI working group, told POLITICO. “So we’re not going to try to restrict development here.” Now IBM’s lobbyists have mobilized, along with their counterparts at Meta, Nvidia, Andreessen Horowitz and elsewhere. They want Washington to reject strict safety rules and to back “open-source” AI models, which scare some safety advocates because key elements of their source code are publicly available., another senator in Schumer’s bipartisan AI group, told POLITICO that many in Congress have abandoned their once-fearful tone about the technology’s rapid development.
With no new federal AI laws passed and Congress still unclear on its priorities, the Washington lobbying landscape has become a war of almost philosophical arguments backed by significant money — one side warning that AI poses existential risks to humanity, and the other cautioning against rules that slow or block its transformational benefits to society and national security.
An Nvidia spokesperson would not directly confirm that the company is lobbying against on-chip governance plans. But the spokesperson said that while such systems are “still many years away,” they “must protect security, confidentiality, and privacy and not introduce backdoors and other system vulnerabilities that malicious actors can exploit.”
“This is a winnable war on behalf of startups and open source, and freedom and competition,” Andreeseen said. “I’m worried, but I’m feeling much better about it than I was nine months ago.”, a libertarian tech-policy nonprofit backed by Koch dollars and what Neil Chilson, the group’s head of AI policy, called donations from “Silicon Valley and Austin types.”