Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of Washington Secrets. If a friend sent you this and you’d like to sign up, CLICK HERE. Today, we look at how AI companies might have to adjust their message to persuade President Donald Trump to regulate their industry, and we say farewell to a friend.
Leading figures in the field of artificial intelligence are developing new messaging to try to win over Donald Trump and persuade the president to work with them on regulation.
It includes direct references to the risk to Trump’s personal wealth, as well as the idea that making a stand could finally deliver his much-coveted Nobel Peace Prize.
Their problem is that he is on the opposite side of them in the safety debate. While they urge guardrails on a rapidly accelerating technology, he claims the only constraint needed is a “high IQ” president.
Brendan Steinhauser, chief executive of the Alliance for Secure AI, said he thought the president would shift his thinking as he heard more about the worries of his base.
“Especially as he understands that this technology has the risk of totally disrupting the financial markets, causing a huge recession or worse under his watch,” Steinhauser told journalists Monday.
It was no different from any other lobbying, he said, and was a case of finding different messages for different audiences.
“And the other message to him, I think, is, Mr. President, these rogue AIs within months will have the capabilities to empty out my bank account and yours,” Steinhauser said. “It could basically steal the Trump family fortune, put it into some offshore bank. You’ll never know that it hit you.”
It means AI is the latest industry to brainstorm ways to reach a president with his own unique style of decision-making.
Steinhauser said he was trying to share that message in a public way, but also a private way, via people close to Trump.
“But I’m confident we will get through based on those things I laid out,” he said.
His group is proposing a middle way for regulation. It was funded by money from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s philanthropic group, Coefficient Giving, which has strong ties to the Effective Altruism movement.
Moskovitz was an early backer of AI giant Anthropic, which shares a web of institutional, financial, and personal connections with Coefficient Giving.
Concerns about the safety of the latest AI models exploded last week.
Jacob Coxon resigned as an Anthropic researcher, saying the company and its competitors were not acting responsibly. He said there was a 10% chance that AI would cause human extinction within the next 10 years.
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, then said he believed the industry must “pace the frontier,” essentially slowing development in order to manage risk.
The Trump administration has broadly been reluctant to regulate AI for fear that China could overtake the US in the AI race.
“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Monday.
Hence, the need to find a message he might understand.
Trump and China’s Xi Jinping could even win the Nobel Peace Prize if they could come up with some sort of agreement on managing the risks, according to Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI.
“I think that clearly the two countries are going to compete in lots of ways, and this is going to be important socioeconomically, geopolitically,” he told Fortune in an interview.
“They should be able to agree that no one should be taking a certain level of risk with the development process of this and, even if just the U.S. and China could agree on some shared standards and testing for development of this technology, I think that’d be a wonderful accomplishment that the two of them can deliver.”
That would right an unusually topsy-turvy moment in American politics. For now, it is the AI innovators urging caution and regulation, and the chief executive who wants unfettered, accelerated development of a new, potentially dangerous technology.
You are reading Washington Secrets, a guide to power and politics in D.C. and beyond. It is written by Rob Crilly, who you can reach at [email protected] with your comments, story tips, and suggestions.
Farewell to a DC master of the dark arts
For five years, Ed Roman has been dispensing quotes, briefings, and general bonhomie as director of communications at the British Embassy. That’s five prime ministers if you want to measure it that way.
Last night, journalists, diplomats, and politicians gathered at the British ambassador’s residence to wish him farewell as he leaves the diplomatic service and returns to London to make some proper money.
It has been an interesting five years to say the least. He is on his third ambassador, two of whom would much rather have stayed longer in Washington, and the embassy is currently without a deputy after the last incumbent was ordered home in a hurry.
Through it all, Roman has been quietly steering coverage, even if his sartorial choices were never quiet (pink pants for a Barbie movie party, white linen for a Wimbledon tea, or “rancher casual” for an event with a longhorn bull). If his colleagues sometimes sent up the “Where’s Ed” cry, journalists always knew where he was: at the bar or at a table in the Palm (particularly when Secrets was paying).
This is how he summed up his time in Washington during an otherwise off-the-record speech.
“Three major wars, a few small ones, trade wars, culture wars, several assassination attempts. One of which we all had a ringside seat for. Plenty of politics. It’s been frenetic, and then occasionally this embassy makes its own news, which is exciting. Very much not the plan,” he said in his typically dry way.
“I’ve had to mop up after a few colleagues who disappeared in the night after being far too chatty with people they really shouldn’t be. I’ve also been vexed by a group of six formers (translation: high school students). That was a new one.”
That was a reference to a private talk by the ambassador to visiting British students, which duly turned up in the Financial Times.
After the speeches, it was off to the famed Capitol Hill restaurant Butterworth’s. Co-owner Raheem Kassam may have just returned from helping mastermind Nigel Farage’s byelection win (over Count Binface no less), but he is less good at organizing parties. He failed to realize his own restaurant was already booked for two other events.
The result was something akin to the London pubs to which Roman returns. The party unfolded with Guinness and red wine on the sidewalk. It was so much fun that no one moved inside when the other parties ended.
Sore heads all round. Let’s hope Trump doesn’t launch a broadside against London today.
Lunchtime reading
‘Musk’ film is almost four hours long, engrossing and terrifying. What to know: It’s an “old wine in a new bottle” story, according to documentary maker Alex Gibney, whose past subjects have included Enron and Elizabeth Holmes.
New Carlo Rovelli book challenges science’s understanding of reality and the universe: To understand the world, physics teaches us that we have to lose our everyday grasp of how things work, or look, or feel, and embrace the mathematics. But then, do we really understand the world?