NOVEMBER 1, 2023 Biden’s AI Fearmongering Power Grab His latest executive order aims to put Washington bureaucrats in charge of regulating AI development.

THOMAS GALLATIN MORE BY THIS AUTHOR In his latest instance of executive overreach, Joe Biden issued an order targeting artificial intelligence development. “To realize the promise of AI and avoid the risk,” Biden contended, “we need to govern this technology.” He then boasted that his order was the “most significant action any government anywhere in the world has ever taken on AI safety, security and trust.”

What is more concerning — the prospect of the free market guiding AI development, or federal government bureaucrats unilaterally writing regulations to control AI according to their own desired aims with little congressional oversight?

Indeed, Biden is once again evoking emergency powers as he stretches a law, in this case the 1950 Defense Production Act, to justify a power grab. He justified his likely unconstitutional order by arguing that AI development poses a “serious risk to national security, national economic security or national public health and safety.”

In other words, this new technology is so dangerous that Biden could not wait for Congress to act. That argument is as self-serving as it is absurd. As noted above, this is purely a power grab on Biden’s part.

Case in point, Biden’s order requires all companies building advanced AI to share their performance safety testing, or “red teaming” data, with the federal government. Biden has just made Beltway bureaucrats the new gatekeepers of America’s software innovation. Talk about throwing a giant wrench in the works.

If the Chinese aren’t already threatening to surpass the U.S. on AI development, this move by Biden will ensure that they do.

White House Chief of Staff Bruce Reed made the rounds defending Biden by fearmongering over AI. “[Biden] saw fake AI images of himself, of his dog,” Reed recounted. “He saw how it can make bad poetry. And he’s seen and heard the incredible and terrifying technology of voice cloning, which can take three seconds of your voice and turn it into an entire fake conversation.” In other words, be afraid; be very afraid.

But it didn’t take AI for the Democrats to promulgate one of the biggest hoaxes in political history against a sitting president. For nearly four years, Democrats played up the Russia collusion hoax against Donald Trump. Democrats and their Leftmedia cohorts insisted, despite the lack of supporting evidence, and in the face of countervailing evidence, that Trump was a stooge of Vladimir Putin.

And don’t forget Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, which the FBI knew was legit even as a cabal of deep state former intelligence bigwigs insisted it was Russian disinformation. That gambit was the work of Washington insiders; no AI needed.

Biden’s order is not really about protecting Americans; rather, it’s about controlling them by controlling what technological developments they will have access to. The bigger risk with AI is not its near-limitless potential but that Washington, out of fear and misunderstanding, limits its development and potential while other world players use it to shape the world economy, leaving America in the dust.