They appear to be trying. In January, Congressman Ted Lieu, a California Democrat with a degree in computer science, introduced a nonbinding measure urging House members to regulate A.I., which he generated using ChatGPT. In June alone, members of Congress introduced three bills addressing different aspects of A.I., all with bipartisan support. Onethe U.S.
With nothing comparable on the docket in this country, it seemed likely that U.S. tech companies would continue to advance their products unabated, come what may. That’s why last Friday’s news was significant. Here were Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Inflection, seeming to concede that they might not be able to control their A.I. platforms on their own.
The companies’ commitment to watermarking the material generated by their A.I. products is a welcome and necessary safety provision. As Anne Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technologies, told me, this “will reduce the dangers of fraud and deception as information spreads, since there will now be ways to trace generated content back to its source.” But it is not straightforward.