San Francisco Tech Week filled the city's restaurants and event spaces this week with venture capitalists and AI founders, and many of them were thrilled with the White House's approach to regulating artificial intelligence: mostly, leave it to the companies.
That was the mood the Associated Press found at events around the city, including a crowded session on Wednesday where founders and investors said the federal government's hands-off stance would mean bigger profits for companies building AI-powered defense and security systems.
A voluntary pact, not a law
The backdrop is a luncheon President Donald Trump hosted for tech leaders in Washington late last month, where he ceremonially signed a voluntary safety pact. Trump described it as "almost a constitution" for "Super Intelligence," the administration's new preferred term for AI. "I'm seeing tremendous self-policing," he told reporters afterward, according to the AP.
Panelists at one Tech Week gathering, part of a run of pop-up events organized by Andreessen Horowitz, praised the government's support for the industry. The firm's head is a Trump science and tech adviser, the AP noted.
Dissent from inside OpenAI
Not everyone in San Francisco's AI scene is comfortable. A day after that session, three researchers at OpenAI's headquarters said the company had fired them, posting that "fear and unclear rules stymie AI safety work." An OpenAI spokesperson pointed the AP to a company post saying the researchers were fired for violating "clear policies on handling sensitive information," and said OpenAI is committed to embedding external assessors and finalizing contracts with third-party safety reviewers.
David Robinson, who helped lead OpenAI's safety team until he recently resigned, told the AP he worries about letting the most advanced labs police themselves. "This is no substitute for hard law, and it does give a lot of freedom to the companies," he said, adding that the time between model generations "is measured in weeks."
Why it matters here
The companies writing their own rules are largely Bay Area employers, from OpenAI in San Francisco to the startups packing Tech Week. With Washington stepping back, the real checks on AI safety for now come from California law, company policies and the people inside these labs, and this week showed those people don't all agree.