Every morning, the president of the United States receives the most exclusive briefing in the world, the PDB. It's the best intelligence on the planet distilled into what matters most. But the contest that will define this century isn't only fought with armies and spies. It's fought in labs, in code, in chips, in technology. That's why we created the President's Tech Brief. Twice a week, we bring you a briefing on technology and national security. The one that we would put on the Resolute Desk. The world is moving faster and so are we by tracking the current state of the tech competition with China through our tech scorecard. Live from the SCSB studio, your briefing starts now.
Hi, welcome to the President's Tech Brief. I'm Millie with the SCSP and we're here live from Washington. I'm here joined by Martin. Martin, good to see you.
Two days ago, you and I, Martin, talked about the lunch that the president was having with the AI CEOs. After that lunch, a document was signed. So, you know what the president calls this morally binding document. So today we're going to analyze what that document means. It has four layers of control that I think the president expects all these companies to follow through. And you know, if you have any questions from the audience or any comments, please let us know. Our question for the day is, do you trust AI companies to police themselves? Your responses are already rolling in, and we'll read some of them during the conversation. Martin, great. Great. So, what's your take, Martin?
Well, I think the four layers are a great starting point, right? What I really want to then know is if one of these tests does indicate a failure, how does that change how the company is structured, how it operates? So, there's some unknowns there: implementation deadlines, who the third-party auditors are going to be, and whether or not any of these reports will be made public. I think there is a benefit to maximize the transparency just so that we can increase trust in what these companies are building.
I think first you need to build trust between the companies because I think having an independent auditor has to be an actor or organization or somebody that really everybody trusts. And then, you know, are the companies really going to showcase everything they're working on and what they're building on? And then thirdly is what happens when they don't follow this?
Exactly. I know we saw the FTC, we talked about this, the FTC, I think court ruling, right? Case against OpenAI, Anthropic yesterday.
Yeah, exactly. So, a lot of developments still in play. So, as we, you know, go through the month, we'll see how this all starts planning out, this is shaping out. But, you know, overall, I think this is a good step in the right direction. And I hopefully it'll take some of the heat out of the debate right now so we can have, you know, more balanced discussion on how we move forward. And I think it provides Congress a good opportunity to fill in whatever gaps may result from what we've seen so far. We had two comments that came on our LinkedIn. If our team can pull it up, but I think people had the same questions like you and I have the conversation.
Similar concerns, I believe.
Yeah, I think so. And I think this is largely representative of how a lot of people are thinking about these issues. And so yeah, it's fantastic to see people engaging with SCSP's posts and on these issues, how we're thinking about it. And that's exactly what we want, right? To just have a mature, robust discussion. And we also have a question on Signal that I just got, Martin. So what do you think is going to happen after this? The president calls it a morally binding document. What does it mean?
Sure. Well, I want to see the companies then telling us what the implementation actually looks like, right? When they start, what their implementation plan is. Again, this provides the leaders of these tech companies a great opportunity to show the American public that they're taking these issues seriously. So I would love to see for each of the companies that are impacted by this, how are you going to act now that you've signed this document? Right. We will cover this topic at length with our guest Brandon Daniels shortly from Exiger, who was at the meeting.
And then we also had a conversation yesterday on our weekly segment Across the Aisle with Mike Kiken and Josh Hodges. But first, you know, this was an interesting week and probably to a certain degree a sad week because our forces left Iraq, where you served, Martin, after how many years now? 23 years probably since, you know, the operation against Saddam Hussein from our forces. We have Bear here from our team joining us who also served there. So I just want to quickly, before we move on to the next topic, just to get your take. You were there how many years ago, Martin?
Exactly 16 years ago. So yeah, I was...
Tell us how you landed there. What did you do?
Yeah. So I was working with the Central Intelligence Agency at the time and, you know, I was working on completely different topics but I wanted to volunteer and, you know, contribute myself to the very important mission that we were there for. Yes, I was originally slated to be in Balad but then it turned out that there was an underlap in staff coverage in Anbar province. So I actually found myself in Ramadi for the rest of the year, which was a pretty wild time.
Was that a formative experience for you?
Oh, absolutely. I never would have fathomed that I would be doing the work that I was doing. Incredible how much responsibility I was entrusted with. Got to work with special operations forces, with diplomats from the United States as well as Iraq, and then a whole bunch of provincial leaders as well.
What about you? How did you end up going there in Iraq?
Well, I was in Iraq three different times. One was in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. This was in 2003. I was working for the US Institute of Peace at that time. So, we were trying to do some capacity building for the newly stood-up Iraqi ministries. And then my second time there was in 2007 during the surge that General Petraeus led. I was privileged to be part of his staff. So I was there for a year and that's really when we sort of turned the tide against the civil war that had erupted in 2006. And then I traveled quite extensively to Iraq in 2015, 2016 during the height of our defeat ISIS campaign with Secretary Ash Carter who led that effort. So this is sort of the third operation that we're bringing to a conclusion called Inherent Resolve. It's bittersweet in many ways. I think on one hand, you know, I'm glad that US service members no longer need to be there and the Iraqis can take care of their own security. We lost nearly 4,600 US service members and over 300 coalition members as well. But, you know, I saw twice what sort of withdrawal from Iraq led to and in neither instance, in 2006 or in 2011, the outcome was positive. You know, in 2011 ISIS came back and engulfed the country in turmoil. So I hope that's not the case this time. I would have preferred that we kept some residual presence to make sure threats in that part of the world don't impact our interests and the stability of Iraq. But we are where we are now.
Yeah. I've never served in Iraq but I was there 48 hours, I think, with the Deputy Secretary of Defense once on the way to Afghanistan. It was fascinating, fascinating, fascinating. That landing in Baghdad is something I will never forget.
Did you do the corkscrew landing?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
How was it for you, Martin, this week to see this coming to an end?
It brought back a lot of memories. Frankly, yeah, and that story and just seeing those pictures that I hadn't looked at in many years, I was like, 'Oh, holy cow, what a time that was.' It was, yeah, it was just again a very important experience for me as an American, for me as a young CIA officer. So yeah, very formative.
Fascinating. I mean, you know, just to thank everybody that served there. Many, many troops, a lot of lost lives and, you know, the region is still, I think, evolving. I mean, we are now, you know, in war against Iran. And I think this doesn't come at the expense of us leaving Iraq. As you said, like every time we withdraw or we change the operation, you know, other actors fill the vacuum. So hopefully this time that's not the case. I would be interested to know your thoughts.
Yeah, I mean, to Martin's point, this was formative not just for me but I think for an entire generation of policymakers in the US. I mean, Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on terror. In many ways I think the Iraq debate continues to this day among sort of the foreign policy elites. You know, I think, you know, Iraq has been through a lot certainly. It's certainly in a much better place now than I think it was in 2003 or 2006 or certainly in 2014. And, you know, hopefully we have different ways of staying engaged there with the Iraqi government and make sure that Iraq remains independent, certainly doesn't become sort of a stooge of the Iranian regime, and that it becomes a net contributor of security to the region. So it looks promising, but again, you know, I'm cautious because the last two times I think things didn't work out the way we had hoped it would.
Gentlemen, thank you to both of you. Thank you for your service. You know, I hope you don't have to go back anytime soon there and I hope that country is on the path towards stability and brighter, you know, perspective for their people first and then for the region. But thank you, thank you.
Welcome back. We're joined now by Brandon Daniels, who is the founder and CEO of Exiger, one of the leading AI companies. But the other reason why we wanted to have you today, Brandon, good to have you.
Good to be here. Yeah, thank you guys for having me.
Great. Is you were one of the CEOs attending the meeting with the president two days ago. So we wanted to take...
I came from the White House, got to go back to the White House right after this.
Thank you for doing this. So tell us what happened inside that room, what was the conversation about and then how that led to the signing of the document.
Yeah. Yeah. So first just taking a step back, you know, a lot of people have talked about that meeting. One of the things that I haven't seen reported anywhere is that the meeting was three hours. And that amount of time with, you know, that group of people led to a really robust discussion, led to a really robust discussion around the future of superintelligence, the name superintelligence. It also led to a really robust discussion around safety, around scalability, around, you know, sort of the infrastructure that needs to be built around superintelligence. It led to, you know, a very, very vibrant debate. You know, because a lot of people have said the meeting was congenial. It was congenial. A lot of people have said the meeting was, you know, a lot of people interacting and engaging, some people that hadn't met before. Yep, that happened too. But there was, the president encouraged robust debate. So we started the meeting and just before the meeting, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen had put together a series of principles that they believed to be, you know, inherently superseding principles that we all could agree to regardless of where we sat on the superintelligence existential threat debate. Right. And so, you know, we had that piece of paper going in and that had been shared with Speaker Johnson. It had been shared with some of the folks in the administration. Like, we knew we were going to come out with an agreement or no agreement, right, on information that had been shared. Then the president...
Was that document coordinated between Mark and Jensen beforehand or they...
Yeah. Yeah. But it was also circulated to the CEOs that were going to be there, right? So, you know, that set of principles, you know, was not new to the people in the room. Then the president opened it up and asked us each for our views, like we all had five to ten minutes to talk and then we had an opportunity to exchange thoughts on the things that people said. So, you know, we all came to a consensus. I mean, everybody thinks like, okay, you know, there's so much alignment in that group because everyone's running companies in superintelligence, in AI that all have the same motive. That's not true. I mean, the motives of Nikesh versus the motives of Hawk Tan versus the motives of Dario are all very different. All of us have different backgrounds. All of us have different business journeys. All of us are on different sides of the spectrum, right?
Like any unresolved issues that you're able to share.
So, I think there was a debate and there were some issues that didn't have to be resolved, right? Like which issue do people believe is the more important one? The existential threat of not being the winner in AI or the existential threat of a potential errant or a purposefully, you know, set, you know, model doomsday, right? We didn't have to agree or disagree which one was more likely, but I will tell you everyone in that room said we had to win the race. There was not, to a man, everyone said the most important thing is that we win the race for sure. But that doesn't mean that some people didn't have on the same level the risk of AI doing something that we didn't anticipate. But the superseding principles that we came up with were, one, look, everyone in that room is a programmer. So we've all built these agents. Like I talked about when the president asked me for my comments, I said, you know, we have to go back to the beginning. The agents that I built, the first agents that I built in my company, because I actually sat down and built the first capabilities, actually were not for my company. The first one that I ever built was actually to diagnose a complex set of cancers that my wife has. She's got immune diseases. She's got what's called Ehlers-Danlos. It actually erodes away at your connective tissue. And I wanted to understand the link between this sort of constellation of cancer that she has and these immune issues, right? Or autoimmune diseases essentially, and see if there was something we could do to attack both. And, you know, my wife right now is in clinical remission because we did attack both. And so I said, we can't forget that in this conversation. And do we want to be the ones that have that kind of power or do we want someone else to be the ones that have that kind of power? And so, you know, we had a conversation and we said, okay, we know that we can put governance in code, so let's do it. Because AI models, superintelligence capabilities, they are impotent without tooling. So it's actually the tooling and the software and the access to data that makes it potent, makes it so it can be productive. We can put governance in that tooling. We can put what I call the surge protector in my systems today. If something is draining too much cost, draining too much compute, or is covering too much cyber surface, there's actually a surge protector that shuts it off. That doesn't mean that that AI model can't keep learning and getting better and better and better. It doesn't mean I have to give up my innovative place. And that's one thing Jensen and Zuckerberg both said was, hey, like I don't think that innovation and safety are at loggerheads. They're actually, you know, one thing here. So, you know, I come back to the point of disagreement on the point that we all have to know the model purpose and set up monitoring safeguards and guardrails to make sure that we are monitoring whether or not the model is operating for its purpose. We all agreed to that. We then all agreed that we could do it in code. We know that we can put that governance into code but we have to empower our people to do it. And then the thing that I thought was brilliant and, you know, even Elon and others were aligned with this is we should have third-party external auditors.
Any discussion on how those third-party auditors would be selected? Are there specific criteria that we're going to look for?
I think one of the things that was interesting is, one, they have to be experts, right, to do the audits and that's a very small population of people. But there's also an opportunity to train people and have people become fluent in these tools. And so that's one thing is we have to be able to attract that kind of talent into the auditors. But one of the things that I also thought was interesting that the president came up with this idea that, you know, you'd have a board for those auditors and those might not be people that are programmers or developers. Those might be great lawyers that understand the technology or great policymakers that understand the technology, which I thought was really brilliant and everyone kind of really liked that idea. I wasn't sure if, you know, we're all technologists and there's a little bit of this like technocrat feel to the meeting, right? But I mean, you know, Vice President Vance said the same thing. I mean, like there was agreement that we should have people that are thinking about more than like how the technology is effective, but think about it more from like a humanitarian impact perspective that I thought was really interesting to that third-party auditor.
We have this four-layer framework now. Which of the layers do you see being most consequential for how companies will behave going forward?
I think one, empowering the people beneath you to make sure that you have the guardrails and capabilities set up to make sure it's safe. I mean, we have to do that already. But I like to think of our artificial intelligence and Palo Alto Networks, Nikesh's from Palo Alto Networks, I like to think of our AI as ruggedized AI, right? Because we deploy to defense networks and we deploy to, you know, FedRAMP High, you know, systems that are managing cargo and stuff like that. So we can't have errant decisions. So all of that stuff is there. But, you know, for consumer AI, for AI that's going out to a hobbyist that might inadvertently build a loop that, you know, ends up taking down a system or crashing a bunch of compute or whatever, that empowerment is really important, right? And I think it addresses some of like what the FTC has brought up in the investigations into Anthropic and OpenAI. And then I thought the idea that we both have board committees and an external auditor that reports to that board committee on AI development and safety, I thought was also really consequential.
I know you're heading back to the White House. Brandon, tell us a little bit, where does Exiger stand in this now? What are you working on? What makes you excited really about the next steps in the space?
So the way that the meeting went, when we closed the meeting, folks scattered off like... I don't think Jensen was on that signed document. Was he? I can't remember.
Tech CEOs, but I don't remember.
I think Jensen was on it.
Was he on it? I couldn't remember.
The way that it happened is we closed out the meeting and like I know Alex wasn't on it because Alex had to run, right? I had to run. Lisa had to run. Like there were a bunch of people that had to run right after the meeting. And so they stayed behind and they signed it. And also because they are the people putting the most money in frontier model development and even though, I mean, Anthropic was not destined to be where they are, they were just very smart about creating their models, right? I mean, they were an underdog in comparison to OpenAI or Nvidia or anybody else, right? So the beauty of where we are is it's democratized and so like somebody not in that room might be the best like superintelligence company in three years, which I think is super cool. But the idea is now what we're doing is we all have to agree to those principles. So in the next few days, we'll all sign on to that document, we'll all agree to it and we will all implement it in our companies.
Is there an agreed-to implementation timeline or is it up to each individual company to...
I think we will get into those details, but it's way faster than anyone could regulate the industry. I mean, a lot of people talk about, oh yeah, let's regulate, let's regulate the, let's regulate. The thing that I thought was wild about that meeting is industry is taking action to provide safety faster than anyone else could act. And there was alignment in that room from the administration to all of the CEOs.
Brandon, thank you. I know you're a busy man. Thank you for dropping by and letting us know what happened. A huge historic meeting that you were part of. So it was awesome. Yeah. Best to you and the company and we'll see you soon.
