As AI booms, fear spreads that Biden is undercutting U.S. industry

America’s artificial intelligence corporate sector is alive and thriving, but many in the tech trenches are expressing mounting concern that President Biden and his team are out to kill the golden goose in 2024… 

…the R Street Institute’s Adam Thierer said the executive action tees up a turf war in the administration for who is in charge of AI policy. He said he is not yet sure who will prevail, but much AI regulation will now likely happen away from public view. 

Mr. Thierer, a senior fellow on R Street’s technology and innovation team, said a tsunami of regulatory activity on AI is incoming.

“So much AI regulation is going to happen off the books,” Mr. Thierer said. “It’s going to be in the so-called ‘soft-law’ arena, soft-power area, through the use of jawboning, regulatory intimidation and sometimes just direct threats…”

But concerns are growing across the AI sector that Mr. Biden’s appointees will look to privately enforce the voluntary agreements. 

Mr. Thierer said implicit threats of regulation represent a “sword of Damocles” approach to tech regulation, an approach previously used as the dominant form of indirect regulation in other tech sectors including telecommunications. 

“The key thing about a sword of Damocles regulation is that the sword need not fall to do the damage. It need only hang in the room,” Mr. Thierer said. “If a sword is hanging above your neck and you fear negative blowback from no less of an authority than the president of the United States, …you’re probably going to fall in line with whatever they want.”

Mr. Thierer said he expects shakedown tactics and jawboning efforts to be the governing order for AI in the near-term, especially given what he said was dysfunction among policymakers in Washington.