Fearing a Loss of Control, AI Bosses Call for Tech Slowdown

A.I. leaders call for slowing down development of the technology, but with President Trump couching the A.I. race as a must-win for the U.S., just how likely is that? We're leading China in A.I. where most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins, A.I. wins. Plus, oil prices rise as Iran-backed Houthis sees more key territory, and with its relationship with the U.S. on the rocks, Canada looks to Europe. It's Monday, September 14th, I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal, and here is the A.I. edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. Following a week of panic over Doomsday warnings about the power of artificial intelligence, the leaders of some of the biggest A.I. companies have agreed that the development of the technology needs to be slowed down, so that it doesn't spiral out of control. That comes after a stunning blog written by Anthropics CEO Dario Amade, which echoed many of the concerns that sparked panic in recent days, after one of his employees said there was a greater than 10% chance that A.I. systems could destroy civilization. Journal tech reporter Amrith Ramkumar has more. On Saturday, Dario Amade said that he supports a gradual slowdown in A.I., a coordinated slowdown, if you will, where all the top companies come together and agree to slowdown, and he wants that to be globally coordinated with the world's largest governments led by the U.S. and China. Right after that, you had Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk, heads of other large A.I. companies essentially come out and back that coordinated slowdown. So now you have the top CEOs in the industry, listening to their researchers and employees essentially, who are worried that A.I. has gotten so powerful that it could get out of control relatively soon. Despite those concerns, Amrith said that A.I. companies aren't clear on what forms of control they want to implement, and the Trump administration has indicated they don't want regulation to hinder innovation and risk China at getting ahead on A.I. And yet some legislative proposals are underway. The Trump administration has been in talks for months with the industry about this, and they've now started testing models at the cutting edge before they're released for up to 30 days. So even the Trump administration is trying to definitely exert more influence and prevent any cyber attacks or biological weapons that were caused by A.I. from getting out of control. A lot of these conversations, though, again, are in their nascent stages, and they don't go far enough for many people in Washington and across the public. A lot of people think these things need to be basically mandatory and that the government needs to play a strong role. The leading A.I. companies want some assurances, in many cases, from the government that they won't get in trouble with antitrust regulators and others if they do a coordinated slowdown. So there are a lot of thorny issues like that that need to be nailed down before a strong action is taken. As our Sam Shekner reported last week, researchers warnings about catastrophic consequences fall into two camps, a loss of control of A.I. that leads to machines, marginalizing people, and another in which human misuse adds to a breakdown of economic and social order. While much of that doomsday talk isn't new, as our tech columnist Tim Higgins wrote over the weekend, it does suggest that the unique safeguards Amade built to resist market pressures at Anthropic are failing here's Amrith again Anthropic and Open A.I. are heading toward initial public offerings and they're trying to please investors and in Open A.I. case, their financials haven't been as strong as some had hoped. So now talk about delaying the IPO may have a safety component and a security component, but also could have financial components and other factors weighing in two. And Anthropic has its own agenda with the regulations it prefers to see and will likely keep fighting for those. So it's definitely not like you have everyone acting in unison or in lockstep on this. But it is an interesting juxtaposition where you have that increasing adoptions head against the backdrop of these sort of doomsday fears that are out there. And a lot of people are looking ahead to President Trump's meeting with Xi Jinping later this month. And there's a big question about whether they'll talk about A.I. risks and whether there could be some sort of coordinated slowdown there that was tech reporter Amrith Romkumar for more on this developing story stay with WSJ dot com throughout the week. Global energy prices are climbing again this morning after a volatile weekend across the Middle East underscored the vulnerability of oil supplies. Top of mind is the status of Saudi oil shipments after hoothy militants in Yemen attacked the Kingdom's east-west pipeline last week that moves crude from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. That pipeline remains closed as we start the week and with the hoothies also now in control of an island in the Babel Men Deb Street linking the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean analysts say that Iran and its regional allies control two of the world's most vital maritime choke points. Andy Critchlow is the head of energy news at Dow Jones Energy. A lot of the reaction from the markets came at the end of last week when news about the pipeline being attacked by the hooties broke. There are certain things the Saudis can do. They've been very quiet about the status of the pipeline, what the actual damage is. It's a strategic link for them now and it's their insurance policy. This goes all the way back to the 1980s when the east-west pipeline was devised as a response to the tanker war in the Gulf at the time which was an energy crisis and it's been under utilized until now this last year and it's been a lifeline for Saudi Arabia. It has capacity to export about seven million barrels a day of crude to the east coast and about three, four million barrels a day can be exported into the Red Sea but you know what we're seeing now in the Gulf is a complete change in the security environment in regards to energy, a region that was defendable and that's now been challenged and you've got to come to the conclusion that infrastructure is very vulnerable in the region. So some of this is already priced into markets, we're over a hundred dollars a barrel but elsewhere you're seeing very, very tight product markets and we've got diesel prices now pushing above eight dollars per gallon and it's because all energy markets are now interconnected. Meanwhile, Gulf states had been due to me today to discuss the situation in the straight of Hormuz before Oman postponed that gathering. And crude is currently trading around $108 a barrel while WTI is just shy of $94. And locked in a trade war with the United States, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is pursuing a pivot to Europe where exclusively reporting that involves a bid to make Canada an associate member of the European Union following months of private conversations with leaders across the continent. And with more, I'm joined by the journals Joe Parkinson. Joe, I get the sense that this push from Carney is both political but also a matter of economic necessity given the financial fallout from souring U.S. trade relations. What exactly is Canada pursuing here? Absolutely. Well, I think you're right. This is something which is being done by the necessity of a rapidly changing trade environment and a rapidly changing geopolitical alignment. So what we've discovered is that the conversations between Carney and top officials at the European Union are actually more developed than perhaps we have seen in public. The Canadians really have been making the running here. And after Trump's comments on the 51st state, I think Mark Carney and his team started to reach out to the Europeans almost straight away with ideas for how they might link their economies up, ideas for places where there would be synergy. They're talking about a relationship that could be something entirely new, not necessarily full membership, but something which binds the Canadian economy, particularly in strategic sectors with the European Union, where they both have key interest. And what we've found out is that on strategic supply chains, where the two economies have the most in common and need things from each other, this is energy, AI, critical minerals for batteries and semiconductors, and of course, most urgently defense. These are areas where they're actually talking about creating something which would look like the single market. That would not be the single market writ large in Canada becoming a full member of the European Union. But it could mean in practice that Canadian good services and workers for those industries could move frictionlessly, and that could mean people to visa-free travel. So this is big stuff. It's exciting stuff. They're also talking about laying underwater cables between Europe and Canada, jointly constructing data centers, cloud storage, satellite networks, all the kind of building blocks of the new generation of the global economy and defense that we're seeing. Joe, if the EU were to endorse some sort of associate membership idea for Canada, that would be a pretty massive break for the EU, would it not? Because it wasn't the lesson of Brexit that there's basically no middle ground. You're either a member or you're not. It was. And I think Brexit both feels like it was yesterday from a European perspective and also feels like it was a long time ago because a lot has changed in the interim and the war in Ukraine and now what's happening with relations being much more strained between the Americans and the Europeans, cause for creative thinking, new thinking, quite what it's going to be called, the bumper sticker of associate membership, affiliate membership, or perhaps something different entirely, a special relationship. The language is being finalized as we speak and it's also very politically loaded. What we do here and what I think even Mark Harnie overnight after our story has made a bit of a splash in Canada and he's been asked about it on the stump. They are saying the relationship will be unique. It's going to be something new. It's going to be unique in terms of its depth and its breadth. It's all working towards Karnie and Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, giving signature speech. reaches this week at the opening of the European Parliament. So it's going to be a very, very exciting week, not just in the trade and political relations of Canada and Europe, but actually to determine what kind of shape the West is now taking. That was the journal's Joe Parkinson, who leads our World Enterprise team. Joe, great story. Thank you so much for bringing it to us. Thanks for having me. Coming up, we've got a look at the rest of the day's news, including a plan by Airbnb to boost housing projects and why Americans still love going to the mall, those stories man more after the break. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson says that President Trump's proposal to send every adult citizen $5,000 if the GOP hangs on to the House and Senate in the midterms would require congressional approval. That puts him at odds with the president who told a Texas news outlet that he didn't think Congress needed to authorize the payments without specifying how he dispensed the likely more than $1 trillion to the program would cost. Here was Johnson speaking on CNN's State of the Union with Jake Tapper. I would assume yes, he'd need Congress to act and that's a creative idea. He launched it at our convention and got a lot of people excited. Of course, devils in the details, we had to figure all that out. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has taken a similar line on the checks, saying the chamber would "cross that bridge" when we come to it. Amazon has paused operations with 21 air following last week's deadly cargo plane crash in Miami. The decision comes as federal regulators investigate why an Amazon branded Boeing 767 operated by the North Carolina Bay's carrier overshot the runway, killing five people on the ground and injuring five others. 21 air, which operated eight planes for Amazon's cargo network, said it's cooperating fully with the ongoing federal probe. Airbnb is setting up a $250 million fund to invest in housing developments facing a financing shortfall. We're exclusively reporting that the first $6.4 million investment will help to back 200 new affordable housing units in Austin, Texas. Being attacked for worsening housing affordability in major cities, Airbnb is hoping that the accelerator can ease the housing crisis, which has become a growing political issue, including in the upcoming midterms. The program will primarily focus on the U.S., but Airbnb hasn't ruled out expanding into other markets where it operates. And move over online shopping, because the mall is back. You may have thought that malls were dying out during the pandemic, but those retail hubs are now outperforming every other type of commercial real estate. In the wake of the pandemic, it became clear that a lot of the panic over online shopping had been overblown. We saw this first, I'd say, at grocery stores where people still really like to shop in person and pick out their own produce. So investors are starting to realize that a lot of people still like going to hanging out and shopping at the mall. That's retail real estate reporter Kate King, who says that mall values have jumped 13% in the past year. Thanks in part to strong consumer spending and rethink of what exactly a mall can offer. Successful mall owners have renovated their properties and added new tenants. And these tenants give visitors experiences they can't get online. So I'm talking about restaurants, spars, and entertainment spots like mini golf or bowling. Luxury shopping is also an experience that many people prefer to do in person rather than online. Another factor working in mall's favor, no one's building them anymore, reducing competition for the 900 that remain across the U.S. And that's it for what's news for this Monday morning. Today's show was produced by Daniel Bach, our supervising producer, Sandra Killhoff, and I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with a new show, and until then, thanks for listening.