00:00Mike, let's turn to you now, because there's this unease that has spread across Washington
00:05and across different municipalities, and indeed from the AI industry itself,
00:09where the AI industry wants to slow down development.
00:12They're even seeking regulation, but the government in Washington doesn't want to do that.
00:17Talk about the tension here.
00:19Well, there is a lot of tension.
00:21And when we think about the debate in Washington over safety, it's going in a lot of different directions.
00:26President Donald Trump on Monday issued a vehement rejection of all the safety concerns
00:31that have been articulated in a groundswell of messages that came from Silicon Valley
00:37and from Dario Amadei, the Anthropic CEO himself, in that 3,800-word essay he published on Saturday.
00:44He really made clear that he sees existential threats potentially emerging in the area of artificial intelligence
00:51and that not only does the industry need to take some steps,
00:54but the government does, too.
00:56The president and his administration for now want no part of that.
00:59They think that additional regulations are unnecessary.
01:02Existing laws, including those governing liability, should answer any potential risks.
01:07But we're hearing a different story from Capitol Hill.
01:10Members of Congress have really escalated their drumbeat for some sort of action,
01:15and yet the odds of anything passing before the end of the year from either chamber remain slim, Scarlett.
01:22And that is simply because they don't have time.
01:25The House is leaving for the election on Thursday, and they won't be back until afterward.
01:31And then after the election, during the lame duck session, they won't have enough days on the calendar really to
01:36do other than some must-pass business,
01:38including a defense bill.
01:41That could be a vehicle for attaching some AI legislation, but all of that gets pretty fraught.
01:46All right.
01:47So the calendar is pretty difficult here, and President Trump wants zero guardrails,
01:51and his explanation is that the U.S. needs to stay ahead of China.
01:54Now, President Xi Jinping of China is due to come to the U.S. in late September on the 24th.
02:00AI, I believe, is on the agenda, but in what way, Mike?
02:02Well, it's unclear exactly how it will be put on the table, but it's certainly front and center in the
02:09discussions between the world's two largest economies on Sunday.
02:13Treasury Secretary Scott Besson will be meeting with his Chinese counterparts, and we expect AI to be part of that
02:20conversation.
02:20It's unclear where and how and what they will be asking of the Chinese.
02:26During his testimony yesterday, we did hear Scott Besson identify himself as the point person when it comes to AI
02:33in dealing with China.
02:35But what the ask will be of China, it's unclear.
02:39The AI developers here in the U.S. certainly have one big ask, and they would like the administration here
02:45in Washington to press China
02:47to rein in some of the distillation practices that they have seen as unfairly extracting their data to build a
02:55rival generation of chatbots over there in China.
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