In Show of Force, Silicon Valley Titans Pledge ‘Getting This Right’ With A.I.

Cecilia Kang

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Elon Musk, left, of X, Tesla and SpaceX and Alex Karp of Palantir were among the tech leaders who met with lawmakers on Wednesday about artificial intelligence.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Elon Musk warned of civilizational risks posed by artificial intelligence. Sundar Pichai of Google highlighted the technology’s potential to solve health and energy problems. And Mark Zuckerberg of Meta stressed the importance of open and transparent A.I. systems.

The tech titans held forth on Wednesday in a three-hour meeting with lawmakers in Washington about A.I. and future regulations. The gathering, known as the A.I. Insight Forum, was part of a crash course for Congress on the technology and organized by the Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York.

The meeting — also attended by Bill Gates, a founder of Microsoft; Sam Altman of OpenAI; Satya Nadella of Microsoft; and Jensen Huang of Nvidia — was a rare congregation of more than a dozen top tech executives in the same room. It amounted to one of the industry’s most proactive shows of force in the nation’s capital as companies race to be at the forefront of A.I. and to be seen to influence its direction.

The A.I. forum was held in the Senate office building’s Kennedy Caucus Room, where hearings on the sinking of the Titanic, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Watergate scandal unfolded.Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

“We all share the same incentives of getting this right,” Mr. Altman said after the meeting, which was held in the Senate building’s Kennedy Caucus Room.

Mr. Pichai called the event “productive,” and he stressed the need for the government to balance the “innovation side and building the right safeguards.”

The gathering, which also included labor union leaders and representatives from outside government and business, punctuated a year of rapid developments in A.I. Ever since ChatGPT, the A.I.-powered chatbot, exploded in popularity last year, lawmakers and regulators have grappled with how the technology might alter jobs, spread disinformation and potentially develop its own kind of intelligence.