Microsoft’s chief scientist has warned that Donald Trump’s proposed ban on state-level guardrails on artificial intelligence will slow the development of the frontier technology rather than accelerate it.
Dr Eric Horvitz, a former technology adviser to Joe Biden, said bans on regulation will “hold us back” and “could be at odds with making good progress on not just advancing the science, but in translating it into practice”.
The Trump administration has proposed a 10-year ban on US states creating “any law or regulation limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems”.
It is driven in part by White House fears China could otherwise win the race to human-level AI, but also pressure from tech investors, such as Andreessen Horowitz, an early investor in Facebook, which argues consumer uses should be regulated rather than research efforts. Its co-founder, the Trump donor Marc Andreessen, said earlier this month that the US was in a two horse race for AI supremacy with China. The US vice-president, JD Vance, recently said: “If we take a pause, does [China] not take a pause? Then we find ourselves … enslaved to [China]-mediated AI.”
Horvitz said he was already concerned about “AI being leveraged for misinformation and inappropriate persuasion” and for its use “for malevolent activities, for example, in the biology biological hazard space”.
Horvitz’s pro-regulation comments came despite reports that Microsoft is part of a Silicon Valley lobbying push with Google, Meta and Amazon, to support the ban on individual US states regulating AI for the next decade which is included in Trump’s budget bill which is passing through Congress.
Microsoft is part of a lobbying drive to urge the US Senate to enact a decade-long moratorium on individual states introducing their own efforts to legislate, the Financial Times reported last week. The ban has been written into Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that he wants passed by Independence Day on 4 July.
Horvitz was speaking at a meeting of the the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence on Monday when he said: “It’s up to us as scientists to communicate to government agencies, especially those right now who might be making statements about no regulation, [that] this is going to hold us back.
“Guidance, regulation … reliability controls are part of advancing the field, making the field go faster in many ways.”
Speaking at the same seminar, Stuart Russell, the professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, said: “Why would we deliberately allow the release of a technology which even its creators say has a 10% to 30% chance … of causing human extinction? We would never accept anything close to that level of risk for any other technology.”
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The apparent contradiction between Microsoft’s chief scientist and reports of the company’s lobbying effort comes amid rising fears that unregulated AI development could pose catastrophic risks to humanity and is being driven by companies prioritising short-term profit.
Microsoft has invested $14bn (£10bn) in OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, whose chief executive Sam Altman who this week predicted that: “In five or 10 years we will have great human robots and they will just walk down the street doing stuff … I think that would be one of the moments that … will feel the strangest.”
Predictions of when human-level artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be reached vary from a couple of years to decades. The Meta chief scientist, Yann LeCun, has said AGI could be decades away, while last week his boss, Mark Zuckerberg, announced a $15bn investment in a bid to achieve “superintelligence”.
Microsoft declined to comment.
