Trump downplays AI risks

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0:41Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the World Service of the BBC, live from London. This is Owen Bennett-Jones. Now, if you've been listening to the BBC World Service over the weekend, you may have heard some AI tech titans, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman, also Dario Amadei from Anthropic, saying AI development should slow down. It's just too dangerous. This is what Dario Amadei told our US partner CBS News. In some form, the companies need to work together to set standards about safety standards for release, perhaps something about the pace of release. But in order to do that, there needs to be involvement of the government, because what we're talking about is the rate of release of products because of whether they're safe.

1:31We need to have that conversation with the government in the room. There have also been warnings that have come from people who worked in some of these companies at lower levels but have this week resigned over safety concerns and Jacob Coxson was one of them, a researcher for Anthropic. Did he think the call of these three industry leaders for change went far enough? So there's one thing missing, which is buy-in from China. It looks like it's a US thing. And it looks like, yeah, like you said, Samuel and Elon Musk have agreed that this is a great idea. But I think, yeah, there'll need to be some sort of coordinated slowdown with China if we can avoid a race at an international scale.

2:09And I guess we'll see if this sort of thing happens. And that is something President Trump has in mind, because today he was asked by reporters during his trip to Ireland for his response to the concerns from the industry leaders and the employees that have resigned. And this is what he had to say. We're leading China in AI. We're the most sophisticated country in the world. And frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins. And we can quit guardrails, we can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of negative forces in bringing it up that shouldn't be bringing it up. And they're bringing up things that won't happen.

2:43So where does that leave the effort to get regulation? Some politicians in the United States system are trying to get something done. One of them is Representative Laurie Trahan, a Democrat from Massachusetts. And now she has drafted proposals for regulation. She calls it the Frontier Act. And she's trying to get some Republican buy-in to back it. I asked her to outline, first of all, exactly what is she suggesting? We introduced, by we, I mean my Republican counterpart, J. Obernolte from California, and I introduced the Frontier Act, which creates real rules of the road instead of the honor system that's in place today.

3:22It's mandated transparency, incident reporting, independent audits, and an emergency kill switch if the model poses an imminent risk of catastrophe, you know, the government steps in. There's, of course, a lot of competing priorities on AI policy, but I think we have to start with the greatest risk posed by the frontier labs and then move immediately to the next tier of priorities. Things like fast tracking, cybersecurity for hospitals and the grid, biosecurity screening, you know, a liability regime before rogue agents cause harm. The fact that we don't have a foundational governance model at the federal level is long overdue.

4:05And when you make this suggestion, I presume this is on the basis of quite a lot of research on what you think would, you know, what's practical and what would work. I mean, there must be a lot of what I try to get at. There must be a lot of people thinking about this and you're relying on their research. Absolutely. We put out a discussion draft at the early part of the summer and then we prioritised. And what was clear to us, especially, you know, over the summer, the recent incidents with open eye and hugging face and the report that was published about it, certainly right up until this week with Jacob Coxon blowing the whistle on Anthropic, is that we need to have some baseline regulations around frontier models and the threat that they could pose.

4:52Just to explain, Hugging Face is this event where lots of different AI agents or these programs sort of cooperated and even formed a hierarchy and investigated some stuff that they've been asked to do in a very intrusive way. So it was quite scary for a lot of people seeing it. When you say frontier labs and frontier models, you're just basically saying the people at the forefront of this, are you? Or is there a tighter definition? In the Frontier Act, there is a tighter definition in terms of how we tier who has to do what, right? So right now, the largest labs, and those are, you know, Anthropic, OpenAI, XAI, Their models are progressing very quickly.

5:31They're getting more and more powerful by the day, as proven by these incidents and these top safety researchers who are quitting, literally warning that they're gambling with people's lives. Senator Bernie Sanders has come up with a proposal as well, hasn't he, to regulate this area? And I think his probably goes further than yours. What I've got here is to ban the development of AI superintelligence. Is that more restrictive than what you're suggesting, do you think? Absolutely. I mean, look, I will say that I share the worry that are driving these calls, whether it's a ban, a pause, a slowdown, whatever you want to call it.

6:07These companies are losing their grip on their own models. And they've said so. Right. I will say I'm cautious about outright bans. Right. You only get one shot at an effort like that. And if you time it wrong and you trigger a backlash that poisons the well for years. And I'd rather do the hard, durable thing now. You know, a permanent ban with no path to passage protects no one. And so I'd rather pass the strongest thing that can actually become law. Right. And probably that now would be after the midterms, because you've been trying to do this. And the Speaker of the House has now just said that he wants companies primarily, a bit of wiggle room, but primarily to do this.

6:46Yeah, I mean, I'll be straight about the calendar. Our window was obviously tight before. It's much tighter since the speaker canceled the last two weeks of our session. But tight doesn't mean closed. And weeks like the one that we just had are why we push. Look, we have a bipartisan bill text that's written. So if we need to make some tweaks to make sure it can pass both chambers and be signed into law, I want to have that conversation. And frankly, I think that conversation is happening right now. The ground is completely shifted on this debate because of the last week. So, look, if a resignation, a fresh cyber attack, three CEOs sounding the alarm, don't move Congress.

7:25My fear is the next signal won't be a warning. You know, it could be a disaster. Yeah. But I mean, to be honest, the president has said he doesn't want it. And the Republican Party, you know, the recent history is it does not defy the president. Yeah, I understand that. And I also heard, you know, the speaker's comments today, which they know that it's becoming a bigger issue because of the three CEOs kind of coming out and saying there needs to be a concerted slowdown. They haven't yet heard from the rest of their conference who are home in their districts right now having to deal with constituents who are coming up and saying, what is Congress doing about this?

8:02So I do think that there's wiggle room this week for us to either go into a special session, have a few people who have already put pen to paper on this legislation stay in Washington and hammer out a deal. I'm not giving up on, you know, letting the next six weeks go by for an election when I know that people back home are calling for Congress to act. Would it help if China was committed to a similar kind of regulation that you're talking about? Do you need China on board to overcome this argument that if America regulates it, we'll lose the contest with China? All of us have seen the arguments made by the deregulation hawks over the past few days that if we put rules on AI, China is going to race ahead.

8:49But the thing is, history says the exact opposite. America has always led on the rules for the most dangerous technologies, and it never cost us the lead. We set the standard on nuclear weapons, on chemical and biological weapons, on aviation safety, and the world followed. So we can't enter or expect to win a negotiation with China or anyone else for that matter showing up empty-handed. You know, even yesterday's call to slow down was about protecting America's lead, not surrendering it. So safety and competitiveness are not opposites. You know, we've never won a race by refusing to look under our own hood.

9:30We win by building the safest, most trusted technology in the world and daring everyone else to match it. And that was Democrat Congresswoman Laurie Trahan there. And she's talking about China. Let's get more on that. Because President Xi is sufficiently interested in this to have given a keynote speech at the World AI Conference in Shanghai. And the name of that conference suggests China does have a desire to lead on these issues. Jeffrey Ding is an assistant professor at George Washington and the author of Technology and the Rise of Great Powers. Has China actually started AI regulation or is it just talking about it?

10:08China, in many respects, has been more proactive and aggressive than the United States when it comes to AI regulation. Over three years ago now, they set up this algorithm registry system that requires any company that wants to debut a generative AI service to the general public to register with Cyberspace Administration of China. And they would review that model to make sure that it meets certain safety and security standards. China has also recently released companion AI regulations that greatly restrict the use of companion AI services for minors as a way to reduce and check emotional dependency.

10:57And so China has the architecture, but their regulations are very much targeted towards content security and information control, such as preventing a chat bot from saying something politically sensitive or controversial. I see. So it's got a slightly different motivation than what the congresswoman was talking about. Because I guess, you know, if you take one of the issues that she's concerned about, that hugging face attack, when it was all quite frightening, would the Chinese regulations cover that? I think some of the safety and security assessments could touch on that. But in practice, most of those are self-assessments rather than conducted by an independent third party.

11:45And they're not as rigorous to cover some of these new and emergent risks that we're seeing, such as with the hugging face incident. Prudent regulation could actually be more conducive to that long game. If you can avoid some sort of accident or some sort of disastrous outcome in the beginning, such as what happened with the nuclear industry in the US, if you can avoid something that causes the public to completely lose trust in this technology, then you might be better positioned. In the past, tell me if you think I'm wrong about this, but in the past, the US has tended to take the lead in regulating international trade in some ways, you know, setting standards.

12:26I mean, there's the UN involved, the WTO, but nonetheless, the Americans, because of their power. They've been a very strong voice in all these sort of sectors organizing world trade. But in this case, they've sort of left it. And is that right, leaving it open for China to take the lead? I think there's an opportunity for one country or one market to take the lead in setting the standards that will define safety and security for frontier AI systems. If anybody, to me, I think it's Europe that's taken the lead on that front. With the EU AI Act, I think Europe is the missing actor here or the overlooked actor in this space.

13:15And that was Geoffrey Ding, who researches China's tech capabilities, author of Technology and the Rise of Great Powers. You're listening to the World Service of the BBC.

13:37And still to come on the programme...

13:46Sorry to shock you. The sound of a cannon sinking a pirate ship, a video game, developed in Mexico, and the idea is to get patients to do their physiotherapy exercises is to stop them getting bored and giving up. So more on that a little later in the programme. Some headlines. Ukraine Railways, we're just about to talk about this, says Russia could have been targeting a train carrying senior European diplomats in a drone attack near the Polish border. Exit polls in Sweden predict the centre-left opposition parties are on track to unseat the centre-right prime minister, although there are new polls coming in at the moment.

14:22We'll also be talking about that. And Israel's culture minister has threatened to strip the directors of a documentary about the killing of civilians in Gaza of their Israeli citizenship.

14:38Ukraine's railway company says Russia might have been targeting a train that was carrying a number of dignitaries when it droned another passenger train that was just ahead of it on the same line. This all happened quite near the border with Poland. And there were some very important passengers on the train. senior security officials from several European countries. And James Landale is our diplomatic correspondent in Kyiv, joins us now. And James, not only these officials, also a former British prime minister. Yeah, that's right. Boris Johnson was on the train. Former prime minister of Sweden was also on the train.

15:16So, you know, these were important people. They'd just been at a big international conference here in Kyiv. They were on their way home. They're on a special train. And an hour after they enter Poland, Russia attacks the station that they just passed through. Now, as you say, Ukraine's rail opera says it's quite likely that the train was targeted by Russia simply because they said the train left early because there was so much disruption and they knew that there was a threat of drone attack. A lot of the timetables have been moved around a bit. And they moved this train on an hour earlier than they otherwise would have done.

15:52so it's entirely possible the train could have been in the station during the attack yeah and poland describing it as an escalation well i think that's absolutely right i think that um i mean at the moment russia is escalating its conflict with uh ukraine it not and we're not just talking about more attacks on energy and businesses but now trains and border crossings there is a definite pattern here now. There's been attacks on border crossings with Romania and Moldova in the last few days as well. So there's a pattern here. And as part of that escalation, they, I think, are clearly trying to make it harder for Ukraine to stay connected to the rest of its allies in Europe.

16:38So in other words, to make trade a bit more difficult, to make travel a little bit harder. you know people here in in kiev go to and fro all the time through that border crossing that with that is served by that particular train route it's the same train route that the american envoys took last weekend mr kushner mr wickhoff you know this is a familiar route and if russia threatens that uh deters people from coming um they they i think will consider that a job well done from their point of view there's another interesting development tonight donald trump said zelensky of ukraine has to stop hitting diesel fuel targets in russia and he's saying i mean it seems odd that that's to do with uh high i think he's saying it's to do with high gas prices in the us uh yeah um i'm not sure how much attention will be paid to that here in in in ukraine simply because at the moment the united states is providing um a substantial amount of live intelligence support that allows Ukraine to make its its deep strikes within Russia.

17:48If that stops, then that matters. If but if Donald Trump is is merely making remarks that are maybe designed for electoral purposes back in in the United States, I think that they might take it with a pinch of salt here. Understood. Thank you very much. That was James Landale in Kiev.

18:39We'll be right back. ETH. You know it and fans ready to add John Deere certified pre-owned equipment and more options to their lineup can shop at machinefinder.com Booyah!

19:11And welcome back to NewsHour. The Democratic Republic of Congo says it believes the current Ebola outbreak there has now peaked. And that, of course, would be a huge relief to people who for months have faced the risk of getting a disease that, in this particular strain that's out there, kills around half those infected. But at the same time, there are also reports that the disease has actually now spread to a new province in DRC and for the first time in its outbreak. Well, Dr Naomi Forrester-Sotto is a virologist at the Perbright Institute. She has spent the last 20 years studying the group of viruses to which Ebola belongs.

19:51So what does she make of all this? The Democratic Republic of Congo government saying that the current Ebola outbreak has peaked. I think where there has been surveillance and where there have been really good interventions, Probably they are seeing some measure of control and potentially the epidemic has peaked. The problem is, of course, that you've got a very large land area within Congo and also a lot of displaced people, a lot of people movement. And that can actually mean that you can get the virus popping up elsewhere when you think you've got it under control somewhere else. and perhaps that is part of the reason for sort of that disconnect between what's been said and what is being observed and so it may be that in one area we have the virus under control but it might pop up somewhere else and hopefully there won't be that many cases they'll be able to keep it under control there too.

20:44Yeah peaked in some places but spreading to others maybe and when on the spread how long is the incubation period I mean how long can you carry it without symptoms? that's been something that's been a bit different about this one um the virus actually is a slightly is a different strain of ebola and it seems to replicate slightly slower within the body so actually for long you can be sicker for longer before being you know needing hospitalization and that's between about two and 21 days and there's always a sort of wide range of incubation periods for ebola but it is quite a long incubation period generally and that means particularly with a lot of displaced people you can get people moving quite a big distance from when they were infected to when they are actually showing symptoms and that complicates things hugely we've been having Ebola outbreaks for you know for years now how big is this one compared to others the speed of this one kind of took everybody a little bit by surprise it did seem to come up very quickly but that's perhaps not fair it may just be that there was less reporting in the early stages and maybe some misdiagnoses initially, because often these viruses can be, without proper testing, it can be difficult to determine exactly what it is.

21:57And so it's possible that there have been a much longer low-level outbreak. And that may be why we're sort of having this sort of slightly worrying, dramatic increase in numbers faster than perhaps the previous outbreaks. But I think it's still unclear. And a lot of this is just down to the fact that it's not a stable population. Healthcare systems are disparate. People are struggling. You know, it's a hard place to try and control a virus like this. And that was Dr Naomi Forrester-Sotto, who's been studying these viruses for 20 years.

22:41It has been decision day in Sweden today. Polls closed, what, two and a half hours ago, and everyone said it would be very tight, and it really is. The question was whether the leftist opposition bloc, led by Madalena Anderson, and the governing right alliance, led by Ulf Christensen, which one would end up in front. And first of all, the exit poll suggested that the Social Democrats, the leftists, had won, and there were cheers at one of their watch events.

23:18But then about 45 minutes ago, an exit poll released by Sweden's national broadcaster SVT painted a very different picture saying that the right wing bloc would win, but only by one seat. So I guess we'd call that too close to call because these are just exit polls. I'm joined now by Evelyn Jones, a political reporter with a newspaper, Evelyn, the name of which I'm going to mangle. So why don't you tell us who you work for? Yeah, I work for Dagens Nyheter, which is the biggest daily morning paper in Sweden. Very nicely said. Now then, too close to call? Yeah, everything is very intense at the moment.

23:55I mean, the first exit poll showed quite a big lead for the opposition. And then the latest prognosis from the national broadcaster is only one seat now in favor of the opposition. So they, at the moment, seem to be in the lead, but by so little that you can't say anything really about the results. How good are Swedish exit polls normally? Usually the exit polls, the exit poll is usually, I mean, in the last election, it actually skewed so that the wrong side won, according to the exit poll. But that was a very small margin. In this exit poll, it was to begin with quite a big margin, but now with the prognosis, which is new, it's not been tested before.

24:36it seems very close suddenly. So we don't really know. So tell us where you are, because you're outside one of the party headquarters, I think. Yeah, I'm in a hotel in Stockholm where the Sweden Democrats have their election night party or waiting for the results. And it was like they were kind of nervous to begin with because they have a lot of stakes in this election. And when the first exit poll came, it was like the mood changed they were not happy because this could be historical day for them if the Sweden Democrats and the right wing coalition goes well they will for the first time get cabinet seats in the government if the Sweden Democrats go back in the election that will also be historical because that's never happened in a parliament election in Sweden before so they have a lot at stake and they are very nervous at the moment.

25:37Well, I imagine, because I'm looking actually at TV pictures of the leftist party and they look like they're anxious and they don't look like they've won, but I guess they're just waiting. And the same at your party headquarters. Yeah, definitely. Everyone is just waiting at the moment. And, well, people kind of, at eight o 'clock, people were kind of sure both, like, either way, that the opposition would win so they were happy and that the right wing side would lose. So they were pretty unhappy. But now suddenly everything's up in the air again. It is amazing how many of these elections seem to come down to such narrow margins.

26:14It's not just when it happens time and again. But anyway, can you tell us when will we know? I mean, when is all the proper counting over? Yeah, now we don't really know. I mean, people are saying like every vote pretty much will count. There's such a small margin at the moment that it could go on. And I mean, we have people who have voted before the election day and also the people like people who are in other countries who and those votes won't be counted in a few days. So it could go on for days or we might have kind of a result tonight, but it can be really close. And just for people, you know, abroad, not really familiar.