Senate AI summit gathers tech leaders, power players for closed-door policy talks
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An accumulation of lawmaking power and hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth gathered in Washington Wednesday, meeting behind closed doors to discuss a way forward on managing the surging growth in artificial intelligence.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer convened an all-day "AI Insight Forum" to discuss how Congress can deal with the phenomenon, and personally reached out to top tech CEOs (among other leaders) to gather in an unusual format -- including invitations to the leadership of Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (GOOGL), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META), X/Tesla/SpaceX (NASDAQ:TSLA) (SPACE), and OpenAI.
That meant a long table with Schumer in the middle, OpenAI chief Sam Altman at one end and Elon Musk at the other, Bloomberg reported.
âToday, we begin an enormous and complex and vital undertaking: building a foundation for bipartisan AI policy that Congress can pass,â Schumer said, according to Bloomberg. âThis is going to be one of the hardest tasks we undertake, because AI is so complex, will impact nearly every area of life, and is evolving all the time.â
Artificial intelligence is a double-edged sword, Musk told the gathering: that it could be tremendous source of good, but also a risk to civilization, and also indicated his support for some oversight of the technology.
"It's important for us to have a referee," Musk said after departing the morning session of the forum, which is scheduled to go through the afternoon, with some companies substituting other officials for their leadership. Musk is also involved in an AI project linked to his company X.
"It was a very civilized discussion actually, among some of the smartest people in the world," Musk added. "Sen. Schumer did a great service to humanity here ... I think this meeting will go down in history as being very important for the future of civilization." He said that "almost everyone" in the room raised their hands when asked whether AI should be subject to regulation.
Generally, though, tech leadership supports limits on how AI is used, rather than how it's developed. IBM (IBM) CEO Arvind Krishna has pushed back on one regulatory approach -- a formal licensing regime for top AI models -- saying it would be "a serious blow to open innovation and risks creating a form of regulatory capture. This would inadvertently increase costs, hinder innovation, disadvantage smaller players and open-source developers and cement the market power of a few players.â
And with some form of legislation certain to emerge from the gathering at some point, the forum drew criticism for the lack of transparency in a closed-door format, while the forum's organizers argued that the private meeting would help gather a number of opinions in a short time frame with limited opportunity for "grandstanding" to cameras.

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