Welcome to the Flashpoint.
It seems like everyone in politics is talking about AI—whether the topic is data center construction, a potential bubble, or if the technology will kill us all.
When researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from his position at Anthropic on September 6, he embarked on a media tour in which he called on AI companies to change their approach to the technology. By that Sunday, company leaders followed suit; Anthropic CEO Dario Amodel and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman pledged to examine how their models are developing and look at third-party oversight of their models (made up of a group that the companies being checked on would select).
Talk to people on the ground floor of the IT industry, those most responsible for implementation of the technology, and you’ll hear a different story. It’s a view of the technology’s impact that should be heard.
Recently at IT Brew, I reached out to experts in AI policy and security to ask them what they thought about the current state of play. Here’s some of what they said.
On the what the AI companies are saying, and what they mean:
To Aya Ibrahim, senior fellow for economic and national security at the AI Now Institute, corporate calls for pacing and third-party controls are more a ditching of responsibility than anything else. For IT pros, that means paying close attention to how AI companies are managing the risk, especially when teams are expected to continue to work with their products.
“It requires certain safeguards, it requires certain data practices, certain hygiene, cybersecurity practices, protections, access control, all of that,” Ibrahim said. “A lot of the stories that we have seen over the past few weeks would suggest that all of those things I just named are apparently an afterthought to many people building the technology.”
Ramy Rahman, senior solutions engineer at ArmorCode, told IT Brew that he sees the potential for damage as real and worth planning for. The new agentic swarms are fundamentally different from older bots that lacked the capabilities of modern AI.
Communicating that change in power and capability outside of the IT team, though, can be daunting.
“We can make bots that scrape your website and harbor data and cache images,” Rahman said. “But now, we’re talking about agentic workflows or automated agents, and the difference between those types of verbiages is what is a difficult thing to explain; if you talk about something that has an agentic workflow or agentic AI, you now have to redefine it.”
It’s not all doom and gloom. AI hasn’t delivered on the jobs apocalypse some have warned of; if anything, the technology is creating jobs.
But the fears laypeople have are understandable. Ignorance of the technology and a willingness to blindly accept industry voices as neutral parties has created a loop of misinformation.
Back in May I wrote for the New York Times about the ramifications of this ignorance on progressive policymakers; I could have said the same thing last week because not much has changed:
If progressives in Washington are serious about writing realistic legislation that curbs the excesses of Silicon Valley and prevents the worst effects of A.I. on the livelihoods of Americans, they should listen to the tech industry’s middle and working classes that comprise developers, engineers, analysts and small business owners. These are the people who have a grounded understanding of what A.I. can and cannot do, and whose experiences can provide priceless perspective to inform policymakers on how to implement regulation that matters.… they share the broader public’s concerns over how the technology could impact stretched energy grids, be used by the powerful to target critics without guardrails, warp their children’s education and career prospects and be deployed by malicious actors to attack private and public systems.
Hopefully we can see some movement on regulating this technology going forward that treats it seriously, but I have my doubts that’s coming in the immediate future.
One of the reasons I'm so pedantic anthropomorphizing about AI "thinking" and acting independently is that when you do that, you end up with what Ezra Klein is saying in one part of his lengthy essay today on the technology.
While I don't agree with a lot of what Klein says in this it's a good overview of the current liberal AI panic and worth reading; he’s a good barometer for how people in his orbit, including policymakers, are thinking about this stuff.