Can We Agree: Regulating AI

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And join Michael Smerconish right here in the middle.

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This is The Smerconish Podcast for Independent Minds.

Richard Clarke (1:12)

I'd love to see us be effective at stopping the Chinese from stealing our intellectual property, then turning around and selling it to American companies cheaply to destroy our industry. And by the way, if Anthropic or OpenAI gets destroyed, the effects on our economy, the effects on the stock market will be devastating.

Jennifer Huddleston (1:31)

When the Anthropic Department of War situation occurred, that meant that Anthropic's Clawed was treated with more regulation than China's DeepSeek. If we're going to have a legitimate conversation around cybersecurity risk, then we need to make sure that it's not about targeting an American company for its choices in its product, that we're having an actual conversation around cybersecurity risk.

Michael Smerconish (1:54)

This is Can We Agree? The program that asks whether two brilliant minds from opposite corners of an argument can find any common ground on the questions that matter most to America today.

Artificial intelligence has ignited a fierce national debate about who, if anyone, should write its rules. It's befriending our children, deciding who gets laid off, straining the power grid and starring in Hollywood films. 200 economists, 16 Nobel laureates among them, warn of an upheaval larger than the Industrial Revolution, arriving in a fraction of the time. Ending the twist that no one saw coming, the companies building AI are begging Washington to regulate them. One even bought television time to show a cemetery and ask who's going to hit the brakes if we need to. The machines are no longer coming, they're here.

But here's the question that cuts deeper than any single headline and will outlast them all. Should government take a light touch and risk letting this revolution run wild, or a heavy hand and risk crushing American innovation and handing the future to Beijing? Even the White House can't decide, lurching from one to the other and back again.

Richard Clark served three presidents as the nation's counterterrorism chief and its first cyber czar. He's the man who warned of al-Qaeda before September 11 and was not heard. Clark argues that America is ignoring the warnings once again and that this time the catastrophe won't wait for a commission report. He wants a heavier hand. Jennifer Huddleston is Senior Fellow in Technology Policy at the Cato Institute and one of the country's most respected voices on technology and the law. Huddleston argues that whatever the doomsdayers predict, the consequences of rushing to regulate are certain and trenching today's giants, crushing tomorrow's startups and surrendering America's lead in the defining technology race of our time. She wants a lighter touch. Regulating artificial intelligence, light touch or heavy hand, let's see where they agree. Thank you both so much for being here. I'm really eager to have this conversation. Jennifer, I'll start with you. When it comes to artificial intelligence, are you more amazed or afraid?

Jennifer Huddleston (4:05)

I am much more amazed because all of those headlines you mentioned in your intro are only part of the story. The things we don't for some reason hear as much about is how AI is helping discover new cures for cancer. How AI is finding cybersecurity issues before companies could and helping them patch them. How AI is enabling all of us to have better access to information, to be able to have more opportunities to lead this new wave of entrepreneurship where entrepreneurs are able to use this technology to start businesses, where young people are using this technology in ways that adults might not understand or have predicted, but in beneficial ways, not just in ways that they might be concerned about. So I'm ultimately amazed because even what we could have predicted two or three years ago in terms of the scientific progress in terms of the ability to respond to concerns that AI has allowed, we are already surpassing that. So I'm very excited about what could come next.