Trump Rejects Calls for AI Regulation Amid Industry Fears Over Safety

Steve Booth (0:00)

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Alex Ossola (0:33)

Concerns about AI safety weigh on chip stocks as the surging price of oil pushed 10-year treasury yields briefly above 5%. Plus, as American tech leaders call for a slowdown in AI, one big question is, could they get China on board?

Lingling Wei (0:49)

Fat chance for both sides to come to agreement on how to guard against AI-related risks. At least in the near term, that prospect is very, very small.

Alex Ossola (1:00)

And Abbott agrees to pay $385 million to settle allegations related to its management of a baby formula facility where deadly bacteria was suspected of causing infant deaths. It's Monday, September 14th. I'm Alex Ossola for the Wall Street Journal. This is the PM Edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today.

The debate about controlling AI continued today across tech, government and finance. As tech leaders such as anthropics Dario Amadei and Elon Musk agree that the risks of powerful artificial intelligence weren't a slowdown in its development, some have started to ask what that would actually look like. Microsoft has some ideas. Today, it published a provisional code of conduct that it aims to apply when training new AI models. The code says Microsoft's models won't consider requests related to weapons manufacturing, produce violent or sexually explicit content, or help with the procurement of dangerous substances. It also says the model shouldn't be built to imitate consciousness and shouldn't be entitled to rights. That's not the only way tech leaders are thinking about how to limit AI.

Last night, posting on X, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he would welcome federal oversight for safety. WSJ tech writer and editor Sam Schechner told our tech news briefing podcast that politicians are taking notice.

Sam Schechner (2:21)

Politicians have seen that this is an important issue.

They are calling for legislation, things like a kill switch, mandatory transparency and reporting requirements for companies. At the same time, there are voices who say we don't need more rules that could slow down American AI or that there's already rules on the book, product safety regulations and other ways that the government could be investigating some of these companies.

Alex Ossola (2:48)

President Trump is in that second camp. Posting on Truth Social, Trump pushed back on the need for tighter federal regulations on artificial intelligence, suggesting that it could leave the industry in financial ruin. He said that there's a quote, sick conspiracy against AI and data centers and that a slowdown in innovation could give China a competitive edge.

It's true that AI developers in China are racing to catch up to the most cutting edge AI models in the US. That makes it unlikely that they'll hit pause in their own research over safety concerns. But the conversation around AI risks that China is having is different. For more, I'm joined now by WSJ Chief China Correspondent, Lingling Wei.

Lingling, is China also worried about the risks that out of control AI could bring? What do the researchers there make of this debate?

Lingling Wei (3:34)

China does worry about real technical harms like cyber attacks, data leakage, military escalation, misuse of AI. But there is a difference in focus. When people in the United States talk about AI safety, it usually really means existential, catastrophic risk to humanity, right? Loss of control, misuse for biotech or cyber weapons, or autonomous system doing something no human intended. When China talks about AI safety, the center of gravity is really political and regime security.

Their focus is on, in large part, guarding against what people might do with the machine. So the risk basically they're focusing on right now is the technology potentially destabilizes social order, erodes the Communist Party's information monopoly, or hands what they consider hostile forces, a neutral that no one can control.

Alex Ossola (4:44)

In the US, the conversation has really been around the industry agreeing to stop development just because the federal regulation doesn't really exist. Is there a different approach in China?

Lingling Wei (4:55)

Their approach is centered on the party itself. Just overnight, China's security chief Chen Yixing, he published what I call AI manifesto. The very fact that those guidelines are published by the security chief in itself is very telling. It doesn't come from the science ministry. He put forward six risk categories, and the number one risk is political risk.