OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before a US Senate panel and agreed with calls for a regulatory agency for AI. Unlike high-profile hearings in the past, Altman was not grilled by the senators and was instead praised by committee chairperson Senator Richard Blumenthal as an executive who “cares deeply and intensely.” Altman was also asked what regulations he and the other witnesses would implement “if you were queen or king for a day” and called for a new agency, a set of safety standards, and a requirement for independent audits. Longtime AI critic Gary Marcus had to call on Altman not to sidestep a question about his greatest fear of AI technology. Altman replied that his “worst fear is that we — the field, the technology, the industry — cause significant harm to the world.”
The hearing included a few clear signs of OpenAI’s true priorities when it comes to regulation. For example, when Senator Cory Booker lamented the “massive corporate concentration” of AI power in the hands of a few companies, Altman’s response was noteworthy in its effort to place OpenAI’s power in a good light. He said that there will be many people who develop models and that “what is happening on the open-source community is amazing” — but that there will be a relatively small number of providers that can make models at the scale of a state-of-the-art LLM.
Altman finally said something that emphasized OpenAI’s primary mission: to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” An effort to develop an AI agency that implements a licensing scheme, he said, is not for short-term AI concerns. “Where I think the licensing scheme comes in is not for what these models are capable of today, because as you pointed out, you don’t need a new licensing agency to do that,” he said. “But as we head … towards artificial general intelligence, and the impact that will have and the power of that technology, I think we need to treat that as seriously as we treat other very powerful technologies. And that’s where I personally think we need such a scheme.”
Today’s hearing was the first in a series of hearings intended to write the rules of AI. Senator Dick Durbin said he thought what happened today was “historic.” “I can’t recall when we’ve had people representing large corporations or private-sector entities come before us and plead with us to regulate them,” he said. “In fact, many people in the Senate have based their careers on the opposite, that the economy will thrive if government gets the hell out of the way. And what I’m hearing instead today is a ‘Stop me before I innovate again’ message.”
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