White House Briefs Senators on AI in Secret Meeting

US Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer (photo: Twitter @SenSchumer)

JAKARTA - The White House will brief senators on Tuesday, July 11 on artificial intelligence (AI) in a secret meeting as legislators work to adopt legal protections for the fast-growing technology.

The briefing, which will take place at 3 p.m. local time, will be led by US Senate Democratic Party Leader Chuck Schumer and other senators. This will be the first secret meeting in the Senate to discuss AI and will take place in a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) in the US Capitol.

Speakers at the meeting will include Avril Haines, Director of the National Intelligence Service; Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks; Director of Science and Technology Policy for the White House Office, Arati Prabhakar; and Director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Service, Trey Whitworth.

Schumer told senators in a letter that the meeting will demonstrate how the US government "uses and invests in AI to protect our national security and understand what our opponents are doing on the AI ​​front... Our job as legislators is to listen to the experts and learn as much as perhaps so that we can translate these ideas into legislative action."

Schumer, who last month pushed for "comprehensive legislation" to address AI, vowed to gather "leading minds in artificial intelligence" from September to join "a series of AI Insights Forums that will form a new basis for AI policy."

Governments around the world are considering ways to mitigate the dangers of this emerging technology, and US legislators are increasingly pressing for swift action to address the risks.

Generative AI, which uses data to create new content such as human-sounding text like ChatGPT, is growing in popularity and some experts say it could change society or people.

In April, Schumer unveiled a framework outlining a new regulatory regime to "prevent potentially fatal damage to our country while at the same time ensuring that the US advances and leads in this transformative technology."

Congress has a narrow split of opinion and has yet to reach a consensus on AI legislation.

In April, the CEOs of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, its support company Microsoft , and Alphabet met with US President Joe Biden and other officials to discuss AI.