White House AI Czar David Sacks Talks Trump's AI Executive Order | Bloomberg Talks

Well, Ed, thanks for having me. The problem that we see is that you've got a thousand different bills going through state legislatures right now to regulate AI and over 100 measures already passed. Some of these bills are contradictory and you've got 50 different states running in 50 different directions. That type of compliance regime is going to be very hard for small companies and startups, especially innovators, to comply with. And so what we need is a single federal or national framework for AI regulation. And that's what the president has supported. By the way, he supported this for a long time. If you go back to his July speech on AI, he called for a single national framework then. And what we've done with this EO now is to make clear that that is the administration's policy and to task members of the administration to work with Congress to try and enact that framework through legislation because ultimately this needs to be a law and in the meantime create tools that the administration can use to push back on examples of the most onerous and excessive state regulations.

Well, at the end of the day, that single federal framework has to be enacted through law and we need Congress to do that. And so the president has asked Congress to do that and he's tasked members of the administration to work with Congress to produce that framework. In the meantime, what we've done here is articulate a set of principles. We've said what values are important to us. We said that we want to protect child safety. That's important. We want to respect copyright. We want to preserve the ability of local communities to choose what infrastructure is in their communities. We're not seeking to preempt the states in any of those areas. So, this is an important set of principles that we have put forth. And at the same time, the EO provides for a number of tools that can be used to push back on excessive state regulation. And let me just illustrate why I think this is so necessary. Because what we're really talking about here is regulation of AI models and algorithms. Think about how an AI model is developed. You can have developers in one state or multiple states writing the code. It can then be trained in a data center in another state. You then can have inference happen in another state and the entire service is provided over the internet using national telecommunications infrastructure. So you're dealing there with at least four different states and all of them can lay claim to regulating those AI models and those regulations can be in contradiction with each other. Even Democratic governors have admitted this is a problem. Just the other day, Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, basically said that she might prefer to enact California's SB53, which is a regulation that they just passed in California, rather than the bill that her own assembly gave her, the RAISE Act, because she sees that, wait, do we really want to create this patchwork of different regulations? So even Democratic governors are realizing this is a problem, and if they all run in different directions, then we're going to end up with a patchwork or a mishmash of regulations that are impossible for companies to comply with. What the president is calling for here is just common sense. We want to get to a single national framework of compliance as opposed to 50 states running in different directions.