Federal government seeks total control of AI science, says tech billionaire
Billionaire tech investor Marc Andreessen says the Biden-Harris administration has been blocking AI startups because it seeks total control of AI technology.
Andreessen told journalist Bari Weiss of The Free Press last week that he had “horrifying” meetings with Biden officials in May that led to his decision to endorse Donald Trump for president.
“[They told me] AI is a technology basically that the government is going to completely control,” he recalled. “This is not going to be a startup thing. They actually said flat out to us, ‘Don’t . . . do AI startups. Don’t fund AI startups. It’s not something that we’re going to allow to happen. They’re not going to be allowed to exist. There’s no point.’”
The White House said it intended to shape the AI industry into just two or three megacorporations, all under government control. Andreessen asked the officials how they planned to do this when the science behind AI is publicly available, and the answer was simple: the government would control the science.
“They literally said, ‘During the Cold War, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn’t proceed. And . . . if we decide we need to, we’re going to do the same thing to the math underneath AI,’” the investor said.
Andreessen has been warning about how dangerous AI technology — particularly chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Gemini that the public rely on for information — can be in the wrong hands.
“If you wanted to create the ultimate dystopian world, you’d have a world where everything is controlled by an AI that’s been programmed to lie,” he told Weiss. In a recent interview with Joe Rogan, he said censorship through AI chatbots can be “a thousand times worse” than through social media platforms.
Joe Biden: ‘We need to govern this technology’
The Gold Report has been reporting about the federal government’s attempts to control AI technology.
“To realize the promise of AI and avoid the risk, we need to govern this technology. And there's no other way around it, in my view,” said Joe Biden in October 2023 before signing an executive order setting restrictions on AI companies. The order requires companies to report their AI projects to the federal government and comply with government standards.
Lawmakers: We must decide who can develop AI
Plans to restrict the AI industry to two or three powerful but tightly controlled megacorporations began to take shape last year, with OpenAI signaling it hoped to be one of those corporations. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose Microsoft-backed company produced ChatGPT, urged lawmakers to regulate the AI sector with a licensing scheme.
“It is vital that AI companies — especially those working on the most powerful models — adhere to an appropriate set of safety requirements, including internal and external testing prior to release and publication of evaluation results,” Altman told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “To ensure this, the U.S. government should consider a combination of licensing or registration requirements for development and release of AI models above a crucial threshold of capabilities, alongside incentives for full compliance with these requirements.”
A licensing system would be a boon for Altman but a barrier to competitors, thereby forming a powerful technocracy allied with the federal government. Altman signaled that he knew this when he acknowledged that while there will be many machine-learning models, “there will be a relatively small number of providers that can make models at the true edge.”
Lawmakers were pleased with Altman’s proposal.
“We need to empower an agency that issues a license and can take it away,” agreed Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “Wouldn’t that be some incentive to do it right if you could actually be taken out of business?”
“Clearly that should be part of what an agency can do,” Altman responded.
