The AI Regulation Battle Is Only Just Beginning

Joseph Dana
4 min readNov 18, 2023
U.S. President Joe Biden walks across the stage to sign an Executive Order about Artificial Intelligence in the East Room at the White House in Washington

Given the pace of development in artificial intelligence in recent years, it’s remarkable that the United States has only just released clear regulations concerning the technology. At the end of October, President Joe Biden issued an executive order to ensure “safe, secure, and trustworthy artificial intelligence.” The directive sets out new standards for all matters of AI safety, including new privacy safeguards designed to protect consumers. While Congress has yet to enact comprehensive laws dictating the use and development of AI, the executive order is a much-needed step toward sensible regulation of this rapidly developing technology.

Casual observers might be surprised to learn that the US didn’t already have any such AI protections on the books. A gathering of 28 governments for the AI Safety Summit in the UK last week revealed that the rest of the world is even further behind. Held at the historic former spy base Bletchley Park, those attending managed to agree to work together on safety research to avert the “catastrophic harm” that could come from AI. The declaration, whose signatories include the US, China, the EU, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, was a rare diplomatic coup for the UK but light on detail. The US used the event to brandish its own new guardrails as something that the rest of the world should follow.

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