Congress's bipartisan task force on artificial intelligence (AI) released its long-anticipated report this week, detailing strategies for how the U.S. can protect itself against emerging AI-related threats while ensuring the nation remains a leader in innovation within this rapidly evolving sector.

Responses to the report, which sought to strike a "flexible sectoral regulatory framework," were positive and with mixed concerns. 

"The Task Force report offers a thoughtful and forward-thinking framework that balances AI's transformative economic potential with the imperative to address legitimate safety concerns," said Dr. Vahid Behzadan, a professor in the computer science department at the University of New Haven. "That said, there's still work to be done."

He pointed to the importance of developing an "international collaboration strategy," especially with U.S. allies, the need to establish "clearer priorities among the many recommendations provided" and the need for more guidance on market competition and consolidation. 

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The Center for AI Policy, a nonpartisan research organization based in the nation's capital, issued a press release that commended lawmakers for their work on the report. But the group echoed Behzadan's remarks about the need for more detail.

"The body of the report does not contain enough detail about how or when these frameworks will be created," the group said after the report's release. It also expressed concern over the report's lack of emphasis on "catastrophic risks" posed by AI.

"Congress has deliberated on AI for two years now, and it is time to start moving forward with decisive action," the press release stated. 

Yaron Litwin is the chief marketing officer for Canopy, a digital parenting app and an expert in how AI technology is revolutionizing parental control and internet safety. He said "we need faster" and "stronger" protections than what was laid out in the report. "To me, the report appears more business-friendly than not."

The report pointed out that it would be "unreasonable to expect Congress to enact legislation this year that could serve as its last word on AI policy." But while Congress may be slow to act, some states have already moved the ball forward on regulating AI, and experts who spoke to Fox News Digital said the report could serve to bolster those efforts.

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Lawmakers in Colorado enacted the first comprehensive piece of AI legislation this year, which placed certain obligations on developers of "high-risk artificial intelligence systems." Meanwhile, in California, lawmakers passed a bill this month aiming to regulate AI in health care.

"These federal soft law standards could work alongside state efforts to protect consumers and give businesses clear, consistent, and science-based federal guidelines," said Tatiana Rice, Deputy Director for U.S. Legislation at the Future of Privacy Forum, a nonprofit that explores challenges posed by technological innovation. Rice pointed out that an increasing number of state AI laws "include carveouts or assumptions of compliance if businesses adhere to federally recognized standards," and she noted that Congress's approach will likely "make it easier for businesses to meet legal requirements, incentivize consumer trust and safety, and reduce regulatory complexity."

Craig Albright, Senior Vice President of U.S. Government Relations for the Business Software Alliance, posited that the report could likely encourage states "to be more aggressively [sic] next year than what we are expecting to see in Congress."

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On the issue of whether the 25-page report strikes the balance that lawmakers were hoping for in terms of balancing regulation with the need to foster innovation, experts who spoke to Fox News Digital expressed optimism.

"The House AI Working Group report strikes the right tone," Dakota State University President José-Marie Griffiths told Fox News Digital. Griffiths has advised both the Senate and White House on AI policy, including Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., co-chair of the Senate AI Caucus. 

"While there will always be debate over regulation versus not enough government oversight, the report is a step in the right direction," said Griffiths. "With the development of any new technology, regulation requires a nuanced and flexible approach. My recommendation going forward will be for Congress to pick and choose to legislate on specific aspects of AI policy."

Griffiths' reaction to the report was echoed by others who warned that in such a rapidly evolving industry, it will be critical not to get trigger-happy with regulations that could soon become obsolete.

"It is encouraging that the report suggests taking an incremental approach to AI policy," said JD Harriman, a partner at Foundation Law Group who has worked as outside patent council at technology corporations like Apple and Pixar. "Many areas of technology have been stifled by over-regulation before a complete understanding of the technology was undertaken."

"The task force’s honesty – ‘We don’t know what we don’t know’ – is both refreshing and daunting," added Cassidy Reid, the founder of Women in Automation, a nonprofit group that supports women in the tech sector. "It acknowledges the speed of AI’s evolution but raises a bigger question: Are we ready to govern something so inherently unpredictable?"

Airbnb has its sights set on global domination. In earnings calls this year, its cofounder and CEO, Brian Chesky, mapped out what he sees as the short-term-rental giant's biggest expansion markets: Mexico and Brazil in the Americas; in Asia, Japan, India, South Korea, and China, for Chinese residents looking to travel outside the country; and further into Germany, Italy, and Spain in Europe, where it already has a stronghold.

What's connecting these scattered countries? Dave Stephenson, the chief business officer at Airbnb, says they're all places where the company's footprint is small compared to the amount of money people spend on travel there. The company is working on ways "to show up locally relevant," he says, "so that people think of why it's better to travel on Airbnb." Stephenson maintains that Airbnb, despite its name recognition, has a smaller footprint than hotels. The company says it has 8 million active listings globally, compared to, by one estimate, some 17 million hotel rooms. Airbnb aims to close that gap, continent by continent.

There's something else tying this far-flung strategy together: Airbnb is looking for new frontiers at a time when cities around the world are cracking down on the company and other short-term rental platforms, largely in response to complaints that short-term rentals draw (often unruly) tourists and displace locals. Barcelona, which has an estimated 20,000 Airbnb listings, has said it will ban all short-term rentals by 2028. Málaga will stop giving out new short-term-rental permits in dozens of neighborhoods. New York enacted a law in 2023 that wiped nearly all short-term rentals off the map. Other cities, like London and Paris, have been enforcing strict limits on the number of nights each year that a property can be listed for short-term renting.

For Airbnb, terra incognita looks more appealing as some of its terra firma becomes less firm.

When Airbnb was new and growing rapidly in the 2010s, there was little regulation on short-term rentals. Many did not anticipate how homeowners, and even renters, would turn Airbnb into overnight miniature business empires. But complaints mounted over the years. Residents reported that short-term renters often had parties that brought trash, noise, and general chaos to buildings and neighborhoods, even after the company barred guests from hosting large gatherings. Locals also blamed the lucrative rentals for pushing up housing prices. Housing costs are influenced by many factors, but in 2020, researchers found that Airbnb growth in the median ZIP code accounted for an increase of $9 in monthly rent and $1,800 in home prices, making up one-fifth of rent growth and one-seventh of property value increases. A report by the New York City comptroller found that between 2009 and 2016, 9.2% of the jump in rental rates could be tied to Airbnb.

At this point, dozens of local governments around the world have enacted laws regulating short-term rentals that are bespoke to their cities. This gives places where Airbnb is looking to expand the advantage of seeing how various regulations have started to affect housing availability elsewhere, should they want to move proactively. "Even though those places that Airbnb could be pushing into may not have a [regulatory] framework, there's at least these examples where governments have recognized the need to protect housing and implemented successful ways of regulating it," says Murray Cox, founder of Inside Airbnb, which scrapes Airbnb data to show its footprint in cities around the world. Cities could take approaches from other playbooks, such as requiring Airbnb to share data with local officials, zoning short-term rentals to more commercial neighborhoods, or allowing hosts to rent out primary residences a limited number of nights a year.

For Airbnb, the patchwork regulation around the world is both "a problem and an opportunity," says Cox. If rentals are curtailed in Paris, the company could look to expand to nearby cities or rural parts of France where there are fewer regulations. For Airbnb, that might mean moving into new countries. "They either can't grow or they're declining in cities or some parts" of their core markets, Cox says. "The only way that they can either maintain their revenues or grow is to push into other markets."

Airbnb isn't opposed to rules outright. If regulations are in place before the company expands to a new market, it could make the process simpler for hosts and guests and spare Airbnb from having to pivot and wipe tens of thousands of listings from its platform in one swoop after a new law passes. "We really do welcome sensible regulation," Stephenson tells me. "In a sensible, reasonable way, it works quite well." Airbnb is still pushing back against what it believes are overreaching regulations, like those in New York City. And despite the regulations, Airbnb is growing. Its revenue is up 10% year over year, and the number of nights booked grew, along with experiences, which include activities provided by local businesses and tour guides, by 8%.

But Airbnb's challenges don't stop at the regulations. It must also get people around the world to buy in. "Each country is going to have its own dynamics," Jamie Lane, the senior vice president of analytics and chief economist at AirDNA, tells me. In some countries, hosting strangers in your home wouldn't be culturally acceptable. Lane also says there are local competitors to Airbnb in some places "that have been impactful and made it hard for them to compete."

Those challenges are partially why Airbnb pulled out of hosting in China in 2022, wiping out 150,000 listings there. For one, the country's strict travel regulations around COVID-19 lasted longer than measures taken by most other nations, which created a drag on travel bookings. But Airbnb struggled to compete with Chinese companies offering short-term rentals long before that. The homegrown alternatives there included Tujia, which was designed to attract Chinese travelers specifically by anticipating peak travel times and rates, Melissa Yang, the company's cofounder, told CNN several years ago.

Chesky is more confident that Airbnb can win over the hearts and minds of the masses anywhere it goes. "Airbnb pretty much resonates pretty equally everywhere once there's the awareness," he told investors in a call earlier this year. "In fact, I could argue that Airbnb might resonate better in Asia because there's a younger travel population that's not predisposed to hotels, and they're on social media. And we are disproportionately on social media versus our competitors. So I'm very, very bullish about that."

While the company isn't telegraphing its expansion strategy in every country, one of its most obvious moves began in Japan this fall. Airbnb ran an ad in English last year promoting travel in Kyoto, but it ramped up its Japanese ads in October. It's looking to court young Japanese travelers who want to take weekend trips, showing photos of a family traveling to a sleek, modern cabin in a wooded area, where they sing karaoke. Stephenson says Airbnb has also learned that local travelers want proximity to onsens, Japanese hot springs and bathing facilities, so listings there now show nearby onsens.

Elsewhere, Airbnb has been implementing payment methods preferred by locals. The company recently added KaKao Pay in South Korea and Vipps in Norway, among dozens of other options. It may seem like a small step, but Airbnb thinks meeting people where and how they pay will make the service more appealing.

Researchers are closely watching Airbnb's ongoing spread. Bianca Tavolari, a researcher and member of the advisory board of the Global Observatory of Short-Term Rentals, a group of Latin American organizations focused on housing, says Brazil has lagged in regulating short-term rentals, though a court ruled last year that hosts must have explicit consent from property owners to list apartments or condos as short-term rentals. Airbnb shares some tourism trend information with local officials through its city portal, but researchers like Tavolari still have questions about Airbnb's full impact. "We are in the dark," she tells me. Yet "cities are seeing it as a great opportunity," particularly those that depend heavily on tourism dollars, she says, and thinking less about the long-term costs to residents.

Cox says he's "hopeful that some of these locations that Airbnb is planning to push to have already started thinking about" how they'll handle its growth. If Chesky's hypothesis is right, Airbnb could continue to spread rapidly once people in other parts of the world get used to couch surfing or navigating a hidden lockbox to let themselves into their rentals. Cities should be ready before more tourists start packing their bags.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

The Biden administration's aggressive regulatory stance towards big businesses has stymied growth, a cohort of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and other business sector experts expressed to Fox News Digital. 

Earlier this week, Albertsons abandoned its $25 million merger with fellow grocery store chain Kroger, after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), led by President Biden appointee Lena Khan, sought to challenge the buyout, arguing it would stifle competition and raise prices. The challenge and the merger's eventual failure is the latest example of the Biden administration's offensive against big business. 

"We have literally had offers from strategic buyers to buy us, and we go to our counsel and the counsel says, 'Don't even try. The FTC will absolutely flag this thing, and you will spend tens of millions of dollars and be stuck in a bureaucratic hell answering questions in court for a year," said venture capitalist Ravin Gandhi, a former CEO who has been involved in multiple merger and acquisition deals and maintains a stake in a number of startups. 

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"Lena Khan was explicit in talking about even mid-market M&A as a vehicle for monopoly. And anyone who has built a business and sold it, like I have, knows that's ridiculous."

The chilling effect described by Gandhi has been echoed by other analysts, who say that the Biden administration's rhetoric and policies have required businesses to take matters into their own hands by abandoning or restructuring their transactions in the face of FTC and Department of Justice antitrust concerns. An analysis by international law firm Morgan Lewis found that under Biden, the vast majority — nearly three-quarters — of all transactions in which the government sought more details from companies about a proposed merger were subject to enforcement action.

"America wants a different choice," said Cardone Capital CEO Grant Cardone. "This idea that Joe Biden is going to make the world more competitive is a red herring."  

Cardone, too, expressed frustration over regulatory battles with the Biden administration, noting that they have made it "almost impossible for people to do business." 

Several other business leaders, venture capitalists and people with detailed knowledge of mergers and acquisitions echoed the concerns shared by Gandhi and Cardone that business growth has been stymied.

"The FTC’s aggressive antitrust enforcement under the Biden administration has significantly dampened M&A activity, particularly in the tech sector," said Kison Patel, a financial tech entrepreneur and the host of "M&A Science," a podcast about mergers and acquisitions. "For example, one Fortune 10 tech company has scaled back its deal making from 30 to fewer than five transactions." 

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Armen Martin, a veteran merger and acquisitions attorney, added that in talking to venture capitalists, he had heard optimism about FTC Commissioner Khan's exit. She will be replaced by President-elect Trump's nominee for FTC Commissioner, Andrew Ferguson. 

"I think you will see a lot more M&A activity under the Trump administration as companies feel more confident that the government won't get involved," Martin said.

Meanwhile, in a statement to Fox News Digital, FTC spokesperson Douglas Farrar said that the recently blocked grocery store merger "makes it clear that strong, reality-based antitrust enforcement delivers real results for consumers, workers, and small businesses."  

"Today's win protects competition in the grocery market, which will prevent prices from rising even more," he added.

Leaders in the cryptocurrency space are up in arms over documents that were recently uncovered showing the Biden administration instructed banks not to engage in cryptocurrency business.

The uncovered documents allegedly confirm suspicions that cryptocurrency tech founders were being "debanked" under a program known colloquially as "Operation Chokepoint 2.0." 

Chris Lane, the former chief technical officer of Silvergate Bank, accused federal regulators of contributing to his bank's collapse after the documents were released Friday. 

"Silvergate became what it was serving cryptocurrency clients," Lane wrote on social media. "[Crypto was a] strategic vertical we started focusing on in 2013. Regulators came in sometime in Spring 2023 and severely limited the amount of U.S. dollar deposits we could hold for digital asset clients. There went our entire business model." 

Lane described the experience as the equivalent of being "shot in the back." 

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Meanwhile, David Sacks, President-elect Donald Trump's new artificial intelligence and crypto czar, said Friday that there were "too many stories of people being hurt by Operation Choke Point 2.0," and that "It needs to be looked at."

Last week, Paul Grewal, the chief legal officer for Coinbase, considered one of the largest cryptocurrency exchange platforms, shared documents that he and his team had obtained following Freedom of Information Act requests that have paralleled a protracted legal battle between the company and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). 

The documents showed that the Biden administration's FDIC sent numerous letters to banks, calling on them to "pause all crypto-asset related activity."

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"Law-abiding American businesses should be able to access banking services without government interference," Grewal said Friday in conjunction with his publication of the documents. "The incoming administration has the opportunity to reverse so many poor crypto policy decisions, chief among them politically motivated regulatory decisions like Operation Chokepoint 2.0."

Grewal pledged to continue fighting for transparency, including seeking to obtain copies of the documents without redactions.

Concerns over regulators stifling crypto from engaging with banks gained renewed traction during Thanksgiving week after tech investor Marc Andreessen said on Joe Rogan's podcast that more than 30 tech founders had been "debanked" for political reasons. Andreessen compared what was taking place to a similar Obama-era program known as "Operation Chokepoint," which sought to inhibit high-risk industries like payday lenders and gun dealers.  

Fox News Digital reached out to the FDIC and SEC for comment but did not receive a response by press time. 

President Biden's administration has filled up the Federal Register with more pages of regulations than any other president in history, breaking President Barack Obama's record. 

As of last week, on Dec. 3, the Biden administration set a new federal record for the most Federal Register pages filled in a single year – 96,088. The number puts the administration on pace to fill more than 100,000 pages by the end of its term.

The record was previously held by Obama, who, in the final year of his second term, filled 95,894 pages.

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The Federal Register, which is published by the National Archives and Records Administration and overseen by the Office of the Federal Register, is a daily publication of new and amended federal regulations.

"Federal Register page counts are a highly imperfect gauge of regulatory burden. Biden’s milestone, though, still underscores the expanding scope of federal intervention," said Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., fellow at the Washington-based nonprofit the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "The record-setting 2024 Federal Register provides a stark reminder of the scale of the regulatory state, and it ain’t even done yet."

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During the final year of President-elect Trump's first term in office, the Federal Register saw its fourth-largest number of pages filled. However, Crews said that number was likely inflated by efforts to eliminate rules that require agencies to issue new ones, as well as emergency COVID-19 pandemic measures. Meanwhile, during Trump's first year in office, 2017, there were fewer pages added to the Federal Register than anyone since Bill Clinton in 1993, Crews pointed out.

Shortly after entering the Oval Office in 2017, Trump issued Executive Order 13771, which initiated a new federal rulemaking process requiring that for every single regulation added by the Trump administration, two must be taken away. The result of this was net cost savings throughout Trump's first term, Crews said.

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Trump has signaled that he will expand his deregulation efforts during his second term, pledging to erase 10 regulations for every new one added.

Machalagh Carr, director of the Center for Legal Action at the American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce, told Fox News Digital that with the incoming Trump administration "a new day is dawning and help is on the way."

"For the last four years, [the Biden administration] has done their very best to strangle American free enterprise with a blizzard of unworkable regulations and mandates," Carr said. "The political appointees calling the shots in the Biden administration have a hostile view of the innovators and companies that power our economy and believe that government knows best."

Fox News Digital reached out to representatives for both Biden and Trump, but did not receive a response in time for publication.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom will convene the state legislature for a special emergency session Monday to propose a "Trump-proof" legal defense fund of up to $25 million for the state's justice department.

Newsom said in a statement the Golden State "is a tent pole of the country … protecting and investing in rights and freedoms for all people" and that officials "will work with the incoming administration and we want President Trump to succeed in serving all Americans." 

"But when there is overreach, when lives are threatened, when rights and freedoms are targeted, we will take action," Newsom said. "And that is exactly what this special session is about – setting this state up for success, regardless of who is in the White House."

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State lawmakers, who are majority Democratic, are expected to introduce the proposed legislation in the coming weeks. Officials anticipate the legislation will be signed into law before Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.

"It’s not a resistance brand," Newsom told the Los Angeles Times on Sunday. "It’s around pragmatism. It’s about preparedness. We would be fools not to get on top of this before January."

Between 2017 and 2021, California's Department of Justice led 122 lawsuits against Trump administration policies, spending $42 million on litigation. Newsom's office said in one case, the federal government was ordered to reimburse California nearly $60 million in public safety grants.

While California filed over 100 lawsuits against the Trump administration, President-elect Donald Trump lobbed only four major lawsuits against the state. In 2018, Trump's DOJ filed a lawsuit over three California sanctuary state laws that restricted cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. That same year, Trump sued California for its state-level net neutrality law.

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In 2019, Trump also filed a lawsuit against California's vehicle emissions standards, attempting to revoke California's ability to set its own emissions rules. The Trump administration also sued California over its controversial independent contractor law, AB 5, in 2020. 

California, a sanctuary state for illegal immigrants, abortion procedures and transgender transition treatments for children, could be targeted by the Trump administration, especially considering Trump's mass deportation plan of illegal immigrants. 

Meanwhile, Republican state Sen. Brian Jones, who serves as the upper chamber's minority leader, said last month the special session "is clearly just another political stunt" and a "desperate attempt to distract from Democrats’ significant losses across California on Tuesday — in the state Senate, state Assembly, U.S. House, and on key ballot measures, including Prop 5’s defeat and Prop 36’s overwhelming win."

"Californians have made it clear: affordability is their top concern," Jones said. "Yet, even with the massive deficit he created, Gov. Newsom wants to hand his attorney general a blank check to wage endless battles against the federal government — while our own state is on fire, both literally and metaphorically."

• The field of artificial intelligence is booming and attracting billions in investment. 
• Researchers, CEOs, and legislators are discussing how AI could transform our lives.
• Here are 17 of the major names in the field — and the opportunities and dangers they see ahead. 

Investment in artificial intelligence is rapidly growing and on track to hit $200 billion by 2025. But the dizzying pace of development also means many people wonder what it all means for their lives. 

Major business leaders and researchers in the field have weighed in by highlighting both the risks and benefits of the industry's rapid growth. Some say AI will lead to a major leap forward in the quality of human life. Others have signed a letter calling for a pause on development, testified before Congress on the long-term risks of AI, and claimed it could present a more urgent danger to the world than climate change. 

In short, AI is a hot, controversial, and murky topic. To help you cut through the frenzy, Business Insider put together a list of what leaders in the field are saying about AI — and its impact on our future. 

Geoffrey Hinton, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, is known as a "godfather of AI."

Hinton's research has primarily focused on neural networks, systems that learn skills by analyzing data. In 2018, he won the Turing Award, a prestigious computer science prize, along with fellow researchers Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio.

Hinton also worked at Google for over a decade, but quit his role at Google last spring, so he could speak more freely about the rapid development of AI technology, he said. After quitting, he even said that a part of him regrets the role he played in advancing the technology. 

"I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn't done it, somebody else would have. It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things," Hinton said previously. 

Hinton has since become an outspoken advocate for AI safety and has called it a more urgent risk than climate change. He's also signed a statement about pausing AI developments for six months. 

Yoshua Bengio is a professor of computer science at the University of Montreal.

Yoshua Bengio also earned the "godfather of AI" nickname after winning the Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.

Bengio's research primarily focuses on artificial neural networks, deep learning, and machine learning. In 2022, Bengio became the computer scientist with the highest h-index — a metric for evaluating the cumulative impact of an author's scholarly output — in the world, according to his website. 

In addition to his academic work, Bengio also co-founded Element AI, a startup that develops AI software solutions for businesses that was acquired by the cloud company ServiceNow in 2020. 

Bengio has expressed concern about the rapid development of AI. He was one of 33,000 people who signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on AI development. Hinton, Open AI CEO Sam Altman, and Elon Musk also signed the letter.

"Today's systems are not anywhere close to posing an existential risk," he previously said. "But in one, two, five years? There is too much uncertainty."

When that time comes, though, Bengio warns that we should also be wary of humans who have control of the technology.

Some people with "a lot of power" may want to replace humanity with machines, Bengio said at the One Young World Summit in Montreal. "Having systems that know more than most people can be dangerous in the wrong hands and create more instability at a geopolitical level, for example, or terrorism."

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has catapulted into a major figure in the area of artificial intelligence since launching ChatGPT last November.

Altman was already a well-known name in Silicon Valley long before, having served as the president of the startup accelerator Y-Combinator 

While Altman has advocated for the benefits of AI, calling it the most tremendous "leap forward in quality of life for people" he's also spoken candidly about the risks it poses to humanity. He's testified before Congress to discuss AI regulation.

Altman has also said he loses sleep over the potential dangers of ChatGPT.

French computer scientist Yann LeCun has also been dubbed a "godfather of AI" after winning the Turing Award with Hinton and Bengio.

LeCun is professor at New York University, and also joined Meta in 2013, where he's now the Chief AI Scientist. At Meta, he has pioneered research on training machines to make predictions based on videos of everyday events as a way to enable them with a form of common sense. The idea being that humans learn an incredible amount about the world based on passive observation. He's has also published more than 180 technical papers and book chapters on topics ranging from machine learning to computer vision to neural networks, according to personal website.

LeCun has remained relatively mellow about societal risks of AI in comparison to his fellow godfathers. He's previously said that concerns that the technology could pose a threat to humanity are "preposterously ridiculous". He's also contended that AI, like ChatGPT, that's been trained on large language models still isn't as smart as dogs or cats.

Fei-Fei Li is a professor of computer science at Stanford University and a former VP at Google.

Li's research focuses on machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and cognitively-inspired AI, according to her biography on Stanford's website.

She may be best known for establishing ImageNet — a large visual database that was designed for research in visual object recognition — and the corresponding ImageNet challenge, in which software programs compete to correctly classify objects.  Over the years, she's also been affiliated with major tech companies including Google — where she was a VP and chief scientist for AI and machine learning — and Twitter (now X), where she was on the board of directors from 2020 until Elon Musk's takeover in 2022. 

 

 

UC-Berkeley professor Stuart Russell has long been focused on the question of how AI will relate to humanity.

Russell published Human Compatible in 2019, where he explored questions of how humans and machines could co-exist, as machines become smarter by the day. Russell contended that the answer was in designing machines that were uncertain about human preferences, so they wouldn't pursue their own goals above those of humans. 

He's also the author of foundational texts in the field, including the widely used textbook "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach," which he co-wrote with former UC-Berkeley faculty member Peter Norvig. 

Russell has spoken openly about what the rapid development of AI systems means for society as a whole. Last June, he also warned that AI tools like ChatGPT were "starting to hit a brick wall" in terms of how much text there was left for them to ingest. He also said that the advancements in AI could spell the end of the traditional classroom. 

Peter Norvig played a seminal role directing AI research at Google.

He spent several in the early 2000s directing the company's core search algorithms group and later moved into a role as the director of research where he oversaw teams on machine translation, speech recognition, and computer vision. 

Norvig has also rotated through several academic institutions over the years as a former faculty member at UC-Berkeley, former professor at the University of Southern California, and now, a fellow at Stanford's center for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. 

Norvig told BI by email that "AI research is at a very exciting moment, when we are beginning to see models that can perform well (but not perfectly) on a wide variety of general tasks." At the same time "there is a danger that these powerful AI models can be used maliciously by unscrupulous people to spread disinformation rather than information. An important area of current research is to defend against such attacks," he said. 

 

Timnit Gebru is a computer scientist who’s become known for her work in addressing bias in AI algorithms.

Gebru was a research scientist and the technical co-lead of Google's Ethical Artificial Intelligence team where she published groundbreaking research on biases in machine learning.

But her research also spun into a larger controversy that she's said ultimately led to her being let go from Google in 2020. Google didn't comment at the time.

Gebru founded the Distributed AI Research Institute in 2021 which bills itself as a "space for independent, community-rooted AI research, free from Big Tech's pervasive influence."

She's also warned that AI gold rush will mean companies may neglect implementing necessary guardrails around the technology. "Unless there is external pressure to do something different, companies are not just going to self-regulate," Gebru previously said. "We need regulation and we need something better than just a profit motive."

 

British-American computer scientist Andrew Ng founded a massive deep learning project called "Google Brain" in 2011.

The endeavor lead to the Google Cat Project: A milestone in deep learning research in which a massive neural network was trained to detect YouTube videos of cats.

Ng also served as the chief scientist at Chinese technology company Baidu where drove AI strategy. Over the course of his career, he's authored more than 200 research papers on topics ranging from machine learning to robotics, according to his personal website. 

Beyond his own research, Ng has pioneered developments in online education. He co-founded Coursera along with computer scientist Daphne Koller in 2012, and five years later, founded the education technology company DeepLearning.AI, which has created AI programs on Coursera.  

"I think AI does have risk. There is bias, fairness, concentration of power, amplifying toxic speech, generating toxic speech, job displacement. There are real risks," he told Bloomberg Technology last May. However, he said he's not convinced that AI will pose some sort of existential risk to humanity — it's more likely to be part of the solution. "If you want humanity to survive and thrive for the next thousand years, I would much rather make AI go faster to help us solve these problems rather than slow AI down," Ng told Bloomberg. 

 

Daphne Koller is the founder and CEO of insitro, a drug discovery startup that uses machine learning.

Koller told BI by email that insitro is applying AI and machine learning to advance understanding of "human disease biology and identify meaningful therapeutic interventions." And before founding insitro, Koller was the chief computing officer at Calico, Google's life-extension spinoff. Koller is a decorated academic, a MacArthur Fellow, and author of more than 300 publications with an h-index of over 145, according to her biography from the Broad Institute, and co-founder of Coursera.  

In Koller's view the biggest risks that AI development pose to society are "the expected reduction in demand for certain job categories; the further fraying of "truth" due to the increasing challenge in being able to distinguish real from fake; and the way in which AI enables people to do bad things."

At the same time, she said the benefits are too many and too large to note. "AI will accelerate science, personalize education, help identify new therapeutic interventions, and many more," Koller wrote by email.

Daniela Amodei cofounded AI startup Anthropic in 2021 after an exit from OpenAI.

Amodei co-founded Anthropic along with six other OpenAI employees, including her brother Dario Amodei. They left, in part, because Dario — OpenAI's lead safety researcher at the time — was concerned that OpenAI's deal with Microsoft would force it to release products too quickly, and without proper guardrails. 

At Anthropic, Amodei is focused on ensuring trust and safety. The company's chatbot Claude bills itself as an easier-to-use alternative that OpenAI's ChatGPT, and is already being implemented by companies like Quora and Notion. Anthropic relies on what it calls a "Triple H" framework in its research. That stands for Helpful, Honest, and Harmless. That means it relies on human input when training its models, including constitutional AI, in which a customer outlines basic principles on how AI should operate. 

"We all have to simultaneously be looking at the problems of today and really thinking about how to make tractable progress on them while also having an eye on the future of problems that are coming down the pike," Amodei previously told BI.

 

Demis Hassabis has said artificial general intelligence will be here in a few years.

Hassabis, a former child chess prodigy who studied at Cambridge and University College London, was nicknamed the "superhero of artificial intelligence" by The Guardian back in 2016. 

After a handful of research stints, and a venture in videogames, he founded DeepMind in 2010. He sold the AI lab to Google in 2014 for £400 million where he's worked on algorithms to tackle issues in healthcare, climate change, and also launched a research unit dedicated to the understanding the ethical and social impact of AI in 2017, according to DeepMind's website. 

Hassabis has said the promise of artificial general intelligence — a theoretical concept that sees AI matching the cognitive abilities of humans — is around the corner. "I think we'll have very capable, very general systems in the next few years," Hassabis said previously, adding that he didn't see why AI progress would slow down anytime soon. He added, however, that developing AGI should be executed in a "in a cautious manner using the scientific method." 

In 2022, DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman launched AI startup Inflection AI along with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and Karén Simonyan — now the company's chief scientist.

The startup, which claims to create "a personal AI for everyone," most recently raised $1.3 billion in funding last June, according to PitchBook. 

Its chatbot, Pi, which stands for personal intelligence, is trained on large language models similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT or Bard. Pi, however, is designed to be more conversational, and offer emotional support. Suleyman previously described it as a "neutral listener" that can respond to real-life problems. 

"Many people feel like they just want to be heard, and they just want a tool that reflects back what they said to demonstrate they have actually been heard," Suleyman previously said. 

 

 

USC Professor Kate Crawford focuses on social and political implications of large-scale AI systems.

Crawford is also the senior principal researcher at Microsoft, and the author of Atlas of AI, a book that draws upon the breadth of her research to uncover how AI is shaping society. 

Crawford remains both optimistic and cautious about the state of AI development. She told BI by email she's excited about the people she works with across the world "who are committed to more sustainable, consent-based, and equitable approaches to using generative AI."

She added, however, that "if we don't approach AI development with care and caution, and without the right regulatory safeguards, it could produce extreme concentrations of power, with dangerously anti-democratic effects."

Margaret Mitchell is the chief ethics scientist at Hugging Face.

Mitchell has published more than 100 papers over the course of her career, according to her website, and spearheaded AI projects across various big tech companies including Microsoft and Google. 

In late 2020, Mitchell and Timnit Gebru — then the co-lead of Google's ethical artificial intelligence — published a paper on the dangers of large language models. The paper spurred disagreements between the researchers and Google's management and ultimately lead to Gebru's departure from the company in December 2020. Mitchell was terminated by Google just two months later, in February 2021

Now, at Hugging Face — an open-source data science and machine learning platform that was founded in 2016 — she's thinking about how to democratize access to the tools necessary to building and deploying large-scale AI models.  

In an interview with Morning Brew, where Mitchell explained what it means to design responsible AI, she said, "I started on my path toward working on what's now called AI in 2004, specifically with an interest in aligning AI closer to human behavior. Over time, that's evolved to become less about mimicking humans and more about accounting for human behavior and working with humans in assistive and augmentative ways."

Navrina Singh is the founder of Credo AI, an AI governance platform.

Credo AI is a platform that helps companies make sure they're in compliance with the growing body of regulations around AI usage. In a statement to BI, Singh said that by automating the systems that shape our lives, AI has the capacity "free us to realize our potential in every area where it's implemented."

At the same time, she contends that algorithms right now lack the human judgement that's necessary to adapt to a changing world. "As we integrate AI into civilization's fundamental infrastructure, these tradeoffs take on existential implications," Singh wrote. "As we forge ahead, the responsibility to harmonize human values and ingenuity with algorithmic precision is non-negotiable. Responsible AI governance is paramount."

 

Richard Socher, a former Salesforce exec, is the founder and CEO of AI-powered search engine You.com.

Socher believes we have ways to go before AI development hits its peak or matches anything close to human intelligence.

One bottleneck in large language models is their tendency to hallucinate — a phenomenon where they convincingly spit out factual errors as truth. But by forcing them to translate questions into code — essential "program" responses instead of verbalizing them — we can "give them so much more fuel for the next few years in terms of what they can do," Socher said. 

But that's just a short-term goal. Socher contends that we are years from anything close to the industry's ambitious bid to create artificial general intelligence. Socher defines it as "a form of intelligence that can "learn like humans" and "visually have the same motor intelligence, and visual intelligence, language intelligence, and logical intelligence as some of the most logical people," and it could take as little as 10 years, but as much as 200 years to get there. 

And if we really want to move the needle toward AGI, Socher said humans might need to let go of the reins, and their own motives to turn a profit, and build AI that can set its own goals.

"I think it's an important part of intelligence to not just robotically, mechanically, do the same thing over and over that you're told to do. I think we would not call an entity very intelligent if all it can do is exactly what is programmed as its goal," he told BI. 

• Elon Musk says he wants to eliminate the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
• The CFPB was created after the 2008 crisis to protect consumers from financial abuses.
• The CFPB has recouped billions for consumers but has long faced political and legal challenges.

In his efforts to cut government costs, Elon Musk has thrown his support behind slashing a federal office created in the wake of the Great Recession to regulate financial services used by Americans.

"Delete CFPB," Musk wrote on X early Wednesday of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. "There are too many duplicative regulatory agencies."

Musk, along with Vivek Ramaswamy, has been tasked with heading up the Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and finding ways to reduce spending and streamline bureaucracy within the federal government. The unofficial advisors have floated "deleting" entire agencies, laying off staff, and enforcing return-to-office mandates.

When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Trump's transition team said she had nothing to add to Musk's statement.

While it's unclear how DOGE and the incoming Trump Administration would abolish agencies, if it does, the CFPB could be on the chopping block. Here's a look at its purpose, employee makeup, and political controversies.

Why it was created

The CFPB was created by Congress as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. The law aimed to strengthen oversight of Wall Street after its risky mortgage lending practices caused the global financial crisis. The CFPB has a broad mandate to protect Americans from deceptive or abusive practices by US financial firms. The agency investigates consumer complaints related to credit cards, loans, bank accounts, and debt collection and enforces consumer protection laws.

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a professor at Harvard Law School, originally proposed the agency in 2007. In 2010, President Barack Obama appointed Warren to head the CFPB's steering committee to help establish it.

"The time for hiding tricks and traps in the fine print is over," Warren said during a White House ceremony that year. "This new bureau is based on the simple idea that if the playing field is level and families can see what's going on, they will have better tools to make better choices."

How many people it employs

As of March 2024, the CFPB employed just under 1,700 people, earning an average of about $184,000 a year, according to the Office of Personnel Management. The Bureau's 2024 financial report broke that workforce into six groups; about 43% of CFPB's employees work in the supervision and enforcement of financial institutions, 18% in operations supporting the Bureau's other initiatives, and 14% in research, monitoring, and regulations.

What it has accomplished

Since its founding, the CFPB has recouped $19.6 billion for consumers through direct compensation, canceled debt, and reduced loan principals.

The agency has also issued $5 billion in civil penalties against banks, credit unions, debt collectors, payday lenders, for-profit colleges, and other financial services companies. That money is deposited into a victims' relief fund, with nearly 200 million people eligible for relief.

Some of CFPB's most high-profile enforcement actions have been against Bank of America and Wells Fargo. The agency in 2023 accused Bank of America of harming hundreds of thousands of customers by charging illegal fees, withholding credit card cash and reward points, and enrolling them in credit card accounts without their knowledge. Bank of America agreed to pay $250 million. In 2022, Wells Fargo agreed to pay $3.7 billion — a record sum — after a CFPB investigation alleged the bank mismanaged auto loans, mortgages, and deposit accounts, causing some customers to lose their vehicles and homes.

Last week, the agency finalized a rule expanding its oversight to big tech companies like Apple, Google, and Venmo, which offer digital wallets and payment apps and process some 13 billion transactions a year. Earlier this year, the CFPB also limited credit card late fees to $8 a month, compared to the average $32 fee charged by issuers in 2022.

Political controversy

Democrats designed the CFPB to have political independence by funding it through the Federal Reserve rather than While Democrats argue that the CFPB's independence is crucial to its efficacy, Republicans say the agency's funding source and governing structure make it unaccountable to the public and encourage regulatory overreach.

Since its founding, the CFPB has faced legal challenges from Republicans and the banking industry, who've taken issue with a slew of agency policies, including those regulating credit card late fees and those making it easier for consumers to switch between banks.

In May 2024, the Supreme Court rejected a constitutional challenge to the agency's funding structure, reversing a lower court decision in a 7-2 ruling. The high court's decision — authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, a conservative — has bolstered the agency but likely won't shield it from ongoing criticism and legal attacks.

Not everything the agency does has courted controversy. Recently, the agency won praise from Republicans for a new rule that would allow consumers to have more control over how their financial data is used by banks and other financial firms.

Experts expect President-elect Donald Trump to take aim at federal agencies and Biden-era regulations after campaigning on deregulation of the administrative state. 

"The first thing is that on day one of [Trump's] presidency, we'll see a lot of executive orders, which will order agencies to review the administration regulations to determine whether they should be retained, amended or repealed," Robert Glicksman, J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Environmental Law at George Washington University Law School, told Fox News Digital. 

Mark Chenoweth, president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, particularly pointed to Biden-era regulations, saying they could be on the chopping block once Trump takes office, telling Fox News Digital, "the Biden administration did a lot of things that lacked statutory authority completely."

'EFFICIENT AND ACCOUNTABLE': GOP-LED DOGE BILL AIMS TO SLASH OUTFLOW OF FEDERAL DOLLARS

Chenoweth noted that the Biden administration has already been the target of lawsuits over its regulations and said that if Trump were to take those regulations on, "I think they'll enjoy a lot of success."

Trump has already been vocal about his intentions of cutting back on federal agency power and slashing the flow of federal dollars. The president-elect has also announced he has tapped Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). 

The entity will act as an advisory panel, not a government agency, and will be aimed at suggesting ways to dismantle government bureaucracy and restructure federal agencies in order to save costs and improve efficiency, according to Trump's transition team.

Regarding DOGE, Glicksman stated the Trump administration will "certainly take seriously" DOGE's guidance on "cutting back on regulations, streamlining executive agencies, possibly even eliminating some agencies." 

Both Chenoweth and Glicksman said they can foresee labor regulations becoming a target come January. Glicksman said climate change and environmental regulations could also come under fire.

COMER TO CREATE DOGE SUBCOMMITTEE CHAIRED BY MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE TO WORK WITH ELON MUSK, VIVEK RAMASWAMY

"In the labor area, because [the Biden administration has] been so radical, they really reached well beyond what the statutory authority that was given to NLRB or the Department of Labor with a lot of what they've done. So that's one area that I could foresee," Chenoweth said. 

Likewise, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to overturn the Chevron doctrine in June of this year in its Loper Bright decision. The doctrine previously gave deference to an agency's interpretation of a federal regulation. In its holding, the Supreme Court effectively scaled back administrative power in holding that "Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority."

ELON MUSK SAYS 'ALL ACTIONS' TAKEN BY DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY WILL BE ONLINE: 'TRANSPARENCY'

Chenoweth, whose organization litigated on the matter, applauded the Loper Bright ruling, saying it "goes back to empowering Congress rather than the administrative agencies."

"For the last 40 years, the administrative state has been burgeoning because of this ability to, kind of, write law and create law itself when there's a gap or ambiguity in the statute," Chenoweth said. "Now, they're not going to able to do that so much. And so it's going to throw it back to Congress if we need to have reform in an area or new legislation."

Glicksman, however, said Loper Bright could "boomerang" on the Trump administration instead. 

"Had Chevron remained in effect, it would be Trump administration initiatives that would get the benefit of Chevron deference, but that's no longer the case," Glicksman said. "And so it's possible that courts will look more rigorously or apply greater scrutiny to Trump administration initiatives in administrative law issues in administrative ones than they would have done had Loper Bright not been decided."

Glicksman said he can foresee Republican-led legal challenges to later Biden-era actions unfolding specifically in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which notably tends to lean conservative in its rulings. Likewise, Glicksman predicts Democrat-led challenges to appear in the Ninth and D.C. Circuits. 

"I think you'll see blue states led by California challenging those regulations, starting off probably in the Ninth Circuit and the D.C. Circuit, which are more friendly to agency authority than the Fifth Circuit and some other circuits. So you'll see a skewing of litigation," Glicksman said. 

Chenoweth stated that because so many Biden-era regulations "are so lacking in authority," the circuit in which the lawsuit is started may very well not make much of a difference. 

• Spain's Ministry of Consumer Affairs has fined five budget airlines a total of 179 million euros ($187 million).
• The fines affect Ryanair, Vueling, easyJet, Norwegian, and Volotea.
• The ministry accused the airlines of "abusive practices" including charging extra carry-on fees.

Airlines are fuming over a decision by Spain's Ministry of Consumer Affairs to fine budget carriers for what it called "abusive practices" such as charging extra carry-on luggage fees.

The fines, which affect Ryanair, Vueling, easyJet, Norwegian, and Volotea, total 179 million euros (around $187 million).

Ryanair faces the largest fine, at around 107.8 million euros ($112.3 million). Vueling was given a fine of 39.3 million euros ($40.9 million), easyJet 29.1 million euros ($30.3 million), Norwegian 1.6 million euros ($1.7 million), and Volotea 1.2 million euros ($1.3 million).

Spain's Ministry of Consumer Affairs said the fines had been calculated based on the "illicit profit" obtained by each airline from the sanctioned practices, which included charging extra fees for carry-on luggage and for reserving a seat near a dependent or minor.

It also criticized the carriers for a number of other alleged issues, including not allowing cash payments at Spanish airports and requiring passengers to pay "disproportionate" fees to print boarding passes at airports.

The ministry added that the airlines should cease carrying out the named practices.

The decision has led to significant pushback in the industry.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has condemned the move, saying it undermined freedom of pricing.

Willie Walsh, IATA's director general, called it "a slap in the face of travelers who want choice."

"Prohibiting all airlines from charging for cabin bags means that the cost will be automatically priced into all tickets," Walsh said.

In a statement to Business Insider, an easyJet spokesperson said the low-cost carrier would appeal the decision and found the proposed sanctions "outrageous."

"All of our customers can bring a small cabin bag for free which gives them the flexibility to only pay for what they want to," they added.

A Norwegian spokesperson said the company also strongly disagreed with the decision and that it would follow up with Spanish and EU authorities.

"Norwegian is committed to providing safe, affordable travel, and our baggage policy reflects that," they said.

Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary labeled the fines "illegal and baseless," adding that they "would destroy the ability of low-cost airlines to pass on cost savings to consumers via lower fares."

The company said it had instructed lawyers to immediately appeal the baggage fines.

Vueling referred further requests for comment to Spain's Association of Airlines (ALA). The ALA called the sanction for cabin luggage fees "manifestly illegal."

Javier Gándara, ALA's president, said: "The Consumer Affairs Ministry's resolution, if implemented, would cause irreparable harm to passengers by infringing on their freedom to customise their travel according to their needs, forcing them to pay for services they may not require."

Volotea did not immediately reply to a request for comment from BI.

The airlines have two months to appeal the decision, the ministry said.

• Trump's Interior Secretary pick illustrates bipartisan support for housing deregulation.
• North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum has won praise from YIMBYs and progressive urbanists.
• Bipartisan consensus on deregulation aims to boost housing supply and reduce costs.

It's hard to find a policy issue these days that doesn't deeply polarize Americans and their elected representatives. But housing — and building more of it — is a rare exception.

One of President-elect Donald Trump's cabinet appointees exemplifies this trend. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Trump's nominee for Secretary of the Interior and "energy czar," won praise from pro-housing advocates from both parties earlier this year when he made the case for denser, more walkable, mixed-use communities. As a state leader, Burgum has for years pushed for more housing construction, walkability, and density in cities like Fargo and Bismarck.

"He's been a champion of zoning reform and parking reform and transportation reform," Chuck Marohn, the founder of the urbanism nonprofit Strong Towns, told Business Insider. "He reflects a growing percentage of even Republican governors who don't think a war with cities is a good idea."

There's a growing belief across the political spectrum that skyrocketing home prices and rents are driven by a shortage of housing — and that government regulation is making it harder to address that shortage. The pro-development "Yes In My Backyard" — or "YIMBY" — movement has helped popularize this view, and it's attracted enthusiastic followers among free-market conservatives and progressive Democrats alike.

If Burgum is confirmed, he'll likely focus largely on maximizing US oil and gas production and stripping away regulations many progressives support, but he might also have a role to play in Trump's promise to deregulate and open up federal land for homebuilding.

A bipartisan consensus around making it easier to build

While builders and those in the construction industry have long complained about regulatory hurdles, their concerns weren't reflected among policymakers and the media until housing became unaffordable even for the elite, Marohn argued.

There was a turning point when college-educated millennials began struggling with the high cost of housing, while similar Americans "in prior generations, at this point in their life, would have been in homes, had some equity, not stretched so thin, starting to build some wealth," Marohn said. At the same time, the housing shortage has begun to impact communities across the country rather than just large coastal metros.

It's led to a rare cross-party alliance. "You have the intellectual elite of the progressive side of the ledger kind of merging with what I would describe as the lunch pail builder, developer on the conservative side of the equation," Marohn said.

These days, there's widespread agreement among pro-development conservatives and progressives alike that "government is the problem" and "if industry was allowed to build they would build a lot more, and that would make prices go down," said Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University.

While Republicans use language about private property rights, free markets, and deregulation to make a case for YIMBY policies, Democrats talk about racial equity and environmental sustainability, Nolan Gray, research director for California YIMBY said.

"It's a funny situation now because you have Republicans and Democrats basically pushing for broadly the same policies but using radically different rhetoric," Gray said.

Popular deregulatory policies include legalizing accessory dwelling units, eliminating minimum lot size requirements, and rezoning to allow for mixed-use development and more housing near transit.

"In very blue places, upzoning or streamlining permit approvals may not even be called deregulation, whereas in redder places, people are more likely to lean into cutting red tape and property rights and letting the market work," Emily Hamilton, a housing researcher at the libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center at George Mason University, told Business Insider.

Burgum is an example of how a Republican governor can pursue YIMBY policy through a conservative lens, framing his support for denser housing and more walkable communities as good economic policy.

The billionaire, former software entrepreneur, oil executive, and real estate developer has championed rebuilding North Dakota's urban cores while in office. "If you want to recruit people here, you need attractive cities," Burgum said when he was first running for governor in 2016. This month, he proposed nearly $100 million in funding to encourage housing development in the state.

The U.K. is set to create an all-encompassing regulatory framework to govern the crypto sector in early 2025. Speaking on Thursday at the Tokenisation Summit in London, economic secretary to the treasury Tulip Siddiq confirmed that the new rules would include cryptocurrency and stablecoins, which are pegged against a more stable asset such as a […]

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• Donald Trump has surrounded himself with people who have competing views on AI regulation.
• Elon Musk, for example, has supported more AI regulation in the past.
• JD Vance, on the other hand, has called for less focus on regulation and more on innovation.

Some Silicon Valley veterans are betting that president-elect Donald Trump's new administration will make AI development a top priority.

"The campaign by woke Big AI to gain a regulatory capture cartel in Washington just imploded," venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who endorsed Trump and donated $2.5 million to a pro-Trump Super PAC, posted on X recently. "Stick a fork in it, it's over. The US will be the preeminent AI superpower in the world after all."

It might not be so simple, however. Trump has surrounded himself with people who have differing views on AI regulation.

On one hand, his allies are pushing hard to develop AI quickly. The Washington Post reported in July that some advisors close to Trump had drafted an executive order to intensify US attention to the technology, including plans for "Manhattan Projects" to develop AI military technology, new frameworks for evaluating AI models, and reviews of AI regulations signed by President Joe Biden. Trump himself promised to repeal Biden's executive order on AI in the interest of furthering innovation.

Elon Musk, however, may emerge as a figure of relative caution amid the new administration.

Musk, who spent over $130 million on Trump's campaign, has called for greater regulation of AI in the past. He supported California's SB1047 to regulate AI, which California Gov. Gavin Newsom ultimately vetoed. He also sued OpenAI, which he founded with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman to develop AI in a way that benefits humanity, accusing them of prioritizing profits over principles.

Former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who is Musk's partner in the new Department of Government Efficiency, has also called for a close watch on the technology.

"Just like you can't dump your chemicals, if you're a chemical company, in somebody else's river, well if you're developing an AI algorithm today that has a negative impact on other people, you bear the liability for it," he said at a press conference last year. "I think AI can have a lot of good uses in this country. But there are also real risks."

Musk and Ramaswamy also plan to increase government efficiency through "regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions, and cost savings," they wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal this week.

It's not clear if that effort will impact their views on AI regulation. However, some in the tech industry expect Musk's influence on Trump to lead to softer regulations and a more vibrant climate for tech startups.

Vice President-elect JD Vance will likely be an ally of those hoping for reduced regulation. Vance, who spent a little under five years in Silicon Valley as both a venture capitalist and biotech executive, has been an advocate for reducing regulations on the technology.

At a Senate Committee hearing on privacy in July, Vance said Big Tech companies were too focused on new regulations for AI out of fear that the technology would destroy humanity. Such regulations, he said, could "entrench the tech incumbents that we actually have, and make it actually harder for new entrants to create the innovation that's going to power the next generation of American growth."

Those watching the new administration take shape say it's hard to tell which way it'll turn on AI.

"When it comes to Trump's policy decisions, there are few areas less predictable right now than AI," Calvin Newport, a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and author of several books on technology and work culture, wrote to Business Insider by email. "The incoming president will likely have JD Vance on one shoulder, arguing regulation will hurt our competitiveness with China, and Elon Musk on the other, arguing for productions against existential risks — it's anyone's guess which voice will prevail."

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who founded the military drone startup White Stork, spoke at the launch of his new book about AI and the future of the military and said he expected Trump to roll back regulations.

"I think a fair statement is that in the US, whatever regulations around trust and safety are going to occur are going to be very different and much later than I thought," he said. "Now, if you're an entrepreneur trying to do crazy stuff, this is good news. If you're a person who worries about the dangers of these tools, it's not good news."

Jessica Rosenworcel, the first woman to serve as permanent chair on the FCC, said Wednesday that she’ll step down from the agency when Donald Trump assumes the presidency. Rosenworcel joined the FCC in 2012, and was behind a number of efforts to transform the agency charged with regulating the U.S. telecommunications industry. She pushed for […]

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