Expert Voices Roundtable Discussion at Axios' Washington, D.C. AI+ Summit: American Competitiveness & AI

On Tuesday, November 28, Axios hosted an Expert Voices roundtable discussion at our AI+ Summit in Washington, D.C. The discussion convened experts for a discussion exploring how key players are navigating AI regulation and innovation while prioritizing economic competitiveness and national security. Axios global technology correspondent Ryan Heath and cybersecurity reporter Sam Sabin led the conversation.

What they're saying: Attendees emphasized the critical nature of strong public-private sector partnerships to guide the development and ethical adoption of AI especially as its growth and potential for misuse increasingly become matters of economic and national security.

• Victoria Espinel, CEO of BSA | The Software Alliance: "Overall I think tech executives should not be making decisions that have significant impacts on national security … there's an assumption there inherent in that question that governments will make better decisions, and I believe that to be true of our government and some other governments that it will often not be true, and so I think there's also a question of what if anything is possible to do to encourage good actors and try to discourage bad activity regardless of if its coming from the private sector or the public sector."

• Rama Elluru, Special Competitive Studies Project senior director for society and intellectual property: "I agree absolutely that it can't be a binary distinction and we need these public-private partnerships more so than ever, and it is a negotiation and we can't have regulatory capture at the same time. There's different types of expertise on each side that we need to leverage so that we are having the right communications so that the agenda is actually set by government and not by private industry, but private industry is informing those agendas because that's where the resource expertise is."
• Sabastian Niles, Salesforce president & chief legal officer: "We've said before that this AI revolution is a trust revolution, it's potentially also a huge trust gap … some recent research, 43% of customers don't believe that businesses will use AI responsibly. There's also data showing over 50% of workers at some enterprises are using AI, but not in an authorized sort of fashion. There's going to be this push and this drive of how do we advance the frontier of wise adoption, in a trust first motion around these issues. But it has to be through I think government setting up the right guardrails but also recognizing in this AI era, the private sector and adoption, it looks like, will always outpace policy and governmental action."

Thank you to Google for sponsoring this event.