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VP pick United States Senator JD Vance Republican of Ohio and Usha Vance after Former US President Donald J Trumps speech at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at the Fiserv Forum on Thursday, July 18, 2024. Monday night was Trumps first appearance since a rally in Pennsylvania, where he sustained injuries from an alleged bullet grazing his ear. Trump recounted the story in his speech, and also talked about Biden, immigration, and other topics.
Vance offers AI contradictions
On July 15, Donald Trump announced that he has selected JD Vance as his running mate. Vance, the junior senator from Ohio, rose to prominence after publishing his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” but his humble roots took him first to Yale Law School and then to the world of venture capital. He’s hailed as a politician with strong ties to Silicon Valley, and also as a politician fiercely critical of Big Tech. “What do you get when you cross a tech bro with a luddite?” Eurasia Group's Jon Lieber responded when we asked him to summarize Vance’s views.
This apparent contradiction is further highlighted by Vance’s recent statements on artificial intelligence. He has advocated for reduced regulation of the AI sector, and has claimed that tech companies’ focus on existential risks of AI are a lobbying tactic to elicit friendlier regulations.
He also shows a surprising regard for FTC chair Lina Khan’s leadership on antitrust enforcement under Joe Biden, saying that Khan has been “doing a pretty good job” especially in bringing suits against bloated tech companies. Khan notably supports AI regulation.
“I would assume someone who puts the concerns of working people and families first and foremost in his policy orientation would be relatively hostile to specific policies that accelerated the adoption of disruptive technologies,” Lieber notes. “But on the other hand, I would also think this will result in only a limited number of policies that actually attempted to curtail them.”
Lieber suggests that Vance's policy focus might include “restrictions on minors’ access to social media, data privacy rules, and investigations into tech companies for monopolistic practices.” He sees Vance as fundamentally opposed to centralized power, which could have mixed implications for AI innovation.
“This could be either good for AI innovation if you think it will happen in a decentralized way, or bad for AI innovation if you think it can only come from large incumbents with massive resources to spend on energy, compute, etc.,” Lieber said.
Some of Vance’s contradictions may become clearer over time, but they could easily be dwarfed by the whims and policy goals of Trump.
From Sunak to Starmer: What’s next for AI in the UK?
The guard has changed in Britain. For the first time in 14 years, the Labour Party is back in power, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who took office on July 5.
Starmer was set to introduce a long-awaited artificial intelligence bill last Wednesday as part of the King’s Speech, in which Charles III read out the new government’s agenda. But the AI bill was pulled at last minute from the address for undisclosed reasons.
We’ll take a look at Labour’s agenda for potential AI legislation — what they’re planning, when it could come, and how their focus will differ from their Tory predecessors. But first, let’s examine Rishi Sunak’s legacy and whether he accomplished his goal of being a global leader on AI.
What did Sunak accomplish?
Sunak’s crowning moment was the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park on Nov. 1-2, 2023. The summit, held at the famed World War II codebreaking facility, was a global gathering on artificial intelligence safety aimed at international cooperation to deter AI’s worst-case scenarios from occurring. The Bletchley Declaration, the resulting document, was signed by the UK, the United States, and the European Union, but also, notably, China, along with two dozen other signatories. (And Sunak got to pal around with tech CEOs such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman, xAI’s Elon Musk, and DeepMind cofounder Mustafa Suleyman — who has since joined Microsoft.)
Bletchley was an important international agreement, but it also signaled that the UK’s leadership — under Sunak, at least — would be light-touch. He didn’t call for AI legislation, preferring to deploy Bletchley as a voluntary global corporate and government agreement.
Nick Reiners, a senior geotechnology analyst at Eurasia Group, said the hyperfocus on “existential risk” of AI is somewhat of a niche Silicon Valley obsession, a crowd that Sunak was interested in appeasing. “He saw AI as a way to build a legacy in a short time and this issue was something that animated him personally.”
What’s on deck for Labour?
Scott Bade, also a senior geotechnology analyst at Eurasia Group, doubts Starmer will follow Sunak’s lead on AI, but said he won’t throw away the standing that Sunak won for the country either. “Starmer does not have a signature global issue yet, and is unlikely to see AI as that issue,” Bade said. “But I'd be surprised if the UK didn’t keep showing up at the table to build on what Sunak did since this is the niche Britain now has in AI global governance. It will just be dialed down a peg or two.”
Compared with Sunak’s existentialist concerns, Starmer should be more focused on the short-term harms of artificial intelligence, Reiners said, citing workers’ rights and bias as examples. And with that comes the promise of actual legislation.
The bill that Labour was set to introduce would have reined in the most powerful large language models — but actual regulation seems to have been pushed off. In his speech, King Charles read off bills about cybersecurity as well as digital information, which seem to have won out over the AI bill, at least for now. “My suspicion is that they opted not to present this [AI regulation] now as they didn’t want to upset their growth narrative,” one tech leader told the Financial Times. Reiners said that departmental limits on parliamentary bills per session could be a constraint as well, and that AI was a lower priority.
When an AI bill is introduced, expect it to still be light-touch relative to the more expansive European AI Act. “I would say the UK is still generally respected as taking a thoughtful innovation-friendly approach to regulation in general,” Reiners noted.
The UK is home to successful AI startups such as Stability AI, maker of the image model Stable Diffusion, Google’s DeepMind lab, and the digital avatar company Synthesia, which we profiled in last week’s edition. And big AI-focused US tech companies, such as Microsoft and Salesforce have recently invested in the country. With the country’s economy on the ropes, Starmer’s challenge is to introduce legislative reforms that won’t totally scare off Big Tech.What Kamala Harris means for AI
Joe Biden exited the presidential contest on July 21, acceding to increasingly loud calls from his own party to step aside and pave the way for a new face at the top of the Democratic ticket. Enter Kamala Harris.
Harris, the current vice president, has secured the majority of DNC delegates already and is the presumptive Democratic nominee, but her campaign is merely two days old. We still don’t know what positions she’ll focus on or how she’ll govern if she’s able to triumph in November.
But, lucky for us at GZERO AI, there are clues about how she’ll tackle artificial intelligence.
Harris is a Bay Area native with deep ties to Silicon Valley. She’s also the former top prosecutor in San Francisco and the state of California, home to many of the world’s largest and most powerful tech companies. She’s gone after large tech companies on issues such as data privacy and nonconsensual sexual material, but she has also consistently cashed in on donations from many of Silicon Valley’s top donors.
As VP, Harris was dispatched to England for the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park last year. “Just as AI has the potential to do profound good, it also has the potential to cause profound harm,” Harris said in her remarks there. She spoke of not only the “existential risks” the summit focused on, but also algorithmic bias, deepfakes, and wrongful convictions that could be caused by AI.
“Vice President Harris has been a leader on the Biden-Harris administration’s work on AI, representing the United States as the UK’s AI summit in 2023, and has focused on critical safety and civil rights issues,” Adam Conner, vice president of tech policy at CAP Action, told GZERO. “Technology policy issues are not new to Vice President Harris, who has a long history addressing key technology issues from her time as Attorney General and Senator from California, and that expertise would be put to good use if she becomes the next president.”
Harris also sent a warning shot at Bletchley.
“As history has shown, in the absence of regulation and strong government oversight, some technology companies choose to prioritize profit over the wellbeing of their customers, the safety of our communities, and the stability of our democracies,” she said.
While a Donald Trump presidency promises to be hands-off when it comes to regulating AI, look for a Harris presidency to follow in Biden’s footsteps (see more below in the Watching on JD Vance). Biden strengthened export controls on chips, issued an extensive executive order on AI, and ramped up government adoption of the technology — including in the military.
Harris is no stranger to walking the fine line between being pro-innovation and tough-on-tech. She’s done it for decades. As she tries to win back Silicon Valley from the right and make a difference on important tech issues, expect her to draw on her experience from back home.
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Joe Biden claps hands next to U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris while hosting a Juneteenth concert on the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S. June 10, 2024.
Bye-bye Biden. Will Dems choose Harris?
After resisting calls from within the Democratic Party for him to resign for weeks, President Joe Biden announced Sunday that he will not run for reelection in November. He then endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to replace him.
What now? By dropping out, the delegates who pledged to vote for Biden can now vote for whomever they want, opening the door for the party to rally behind another candidate ahead of the Democratic National Convention. Alternatively, the party could conduct an open convention where prospective nominees vie for support from delegates at the DNC on Aug. 19.
Bill and Hillary Clinton have already come out in support of Harris, with more party heavyweights expected to endorse her in the coming days. Other potential candidates are unlikely to throw their hats in the ring to avoid creating chaos. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has already announced she is not seeking the nomination, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom endorsed Harris. “I think that they will wait, they’ll bide their time,” says GZERO and Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer. “They will support Harris, and they’ll wait themselves until 2028.”
But that doesn’t mean others won’t consider a bid. Late Sunday, there were reports that Sen. Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, may re-register as a Democrat in order to compete for the nomination.
Still, Harris is an obvious successor for more reasons than just being Biden’s VP. Importantly, the Biden-Harris campaign war chest – totaling $95.9 million at the end of June – can easily transfer to her. Campaign finance law would require those funds be transferred to the DNC or a Super PAC if anyone else becomes the nominee, making coordination far more difficult.
That being said, Ian says that Harris would “benefit from a process that doesn’t look like the political machine has just decided that they’re going to anoint her, that there’s not going to be a primary process … there needs to be some level of competition.”
Who is Kamala Harris? Harris is the first woman, first Black person, and first Asian American to ascend to the vice presidency. And she would be the first female US president if elected.
Harris began her political career as a prosecutor, district attorney, and state attorney general in California, and went on to be elected to the US Senate in 2016. Her law enforcement record has been both a gift and a curse to her political campaigns, giving opponents on both sides of the aisle fodder to point to when she was either too tough, or not tough enough, on crime.
As VP, Harris has struggled to define herself while being tasked with an issue portfolio that included voting rights and stemming illegal migration at the southern border.
How does she fare against Donald Trump? “That’s the big wild card in this election,” says Eurasia Group’s US director Jon Lieber. “Her favorability is basically where Joe Biden’s was – in the high 30s – which is a bad place to be if you’re going to get elected, but Donald Trump isn’t that popular himself.”
An Economist/YouGov survey found that 79% of Democrats would support Harris as the party’s nominee, and across recent polls, Harris trails Trump by two percentage points nationally, 46% to 48%.
Having been Biden’s VP, Harris will be attacked by the GOP for the administration’s handling of the border and the economy. “Trump does better on the top issues in this campaign, which are inflation, the economy, and immigration,” says Lieber.
That said, she has reenergized the Democratic Party, many of whose leaders seemed close to accepting defeat with Biden atop the ticket. Harris, at 59, also brings youth to a campaign that was previously between two octogenarians. Despite having a decades-long political career, most Americans don’t really know Harris, which gives her the opportunity to make a new impression in the 107 days left on the campaign trail.
“That’s an eternity in US politics,” says Ian. “It is longer than most elections in democracies” around the world.
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Joe Biden is welcomed by Israeli Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu, as he visits Israel amid the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas, in Tel Aviv, Israel, October 18, 2023.
Biden’s out, Bibi’s still in
How will Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming visit to Washington, DC, unfold now that US President Joe Biden has called off his 2024 reelection campaign?
As late as Sunday morning,media outlets were reporting that Biden didn’t want to give Netanyahu “the satisfaction” of bowing out before the trip, due to their recent disagreements over the Israel-Hamas war. Netanyahu was originally scheduled to meet Biden, but that’s in limbo given Biden’s COVID-19 diagnosis.
Now that Biden has announced he will step down, will Vice President Kamala Harris step up? She was already scheduled to meet with the Israeli PM, and all eyes will be on what message she delivers – and how she delivers it, considering it’s her first high-profile foreign policy gig.
Then again, it might not. Netanyahu hopes to have a tete-a-tete with Republican nominee Donald Trump,though no meeting has been confirmed. Republicans have invited the Israeli leader to address a joint session of the US Congress on Wednesday –a speech several Democrats plan to boycott, as 60 of them did during Netanyahu’s lastaddress to Congress in 2015, when he attempted to disrupt the Iran nuclear deal. We’ll be watching who comes out and who stays home this time.FILE PHOTO: U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris campaigns at Westover High School in Fayetteville, North Carolina, U.S., July 18, 2024.
Hard Numbers: The Kamala Harris Edition
38: A FiveThirtyEight analysis of nationwide polls earlier this month found Kamala Harris had a 38% chance of winning the electoral college in November, slightly higher than Joe Biden’s 35%. In either scenario, Trump is still the heavy favorite, but there is a lot of campaigning to do before November.
95.9 million: The $95.9 million war chest the Biden campaign pulled together before his dropping out will now be the center of attention as the unprecedented decision to leave the top of the ticket this late in the game puts the funds in question. Legally speaking, it will be easiest for Kamala Harris to take control of the pot, another measure in her favor.
60: Kamala Harris turns 60 in October, which would make her the average age of presidents should she win. Donald Trump, on the other hand, at 78 years and 8 months, would become the oldest president ever inaugurated.
106: There are exactly 106 days left before the US general election on Nov. 5, and Kamala Harris will need every second to rally the party around her and fight for her shot at the Oval Office. Stay tuned to GZERO for the whole ride.U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle speaks at a press conference by the U.S. Secret Service about the Republican National Convention on Thursday June 6, 2024 in Milwaukee, Wis.
Will new Secret Service admission cost Cheatle her job?
The US Secret Service has now admitted to denying some security requests from Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign over the past few years. Before the assassination attempt against the former president last week, Secret Service agents in Trump’s detail had also requested more snipers and specialty teams at other outdoor events, which top officials at the agency denied due to a lack of resources and staffing shortages.
The change of narrative turns up the heat on Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who is set to testify before a House committee hearing on Monday about the assassination attempt. Questions include why the would-be assassin was not apprehended prior to the attack despite being flagged by a Secret Service counter-sniper 20 minutes before.
While Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas maintains thathis confidence in Cheatle is “100%”, a slew of Republicans, as well as a Democrat,Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, have called for her resignation. President Joe Biden, while supporting Cheatle, has ordered an independent investigation.
At a House briefing last week, Cheatle admitted the Secret Service fell short at a “no fail” mission but so farhas no plans to resign. We’ll see if that changes this week – and what other information comes to light at the hearing.Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) during a House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing, at the U.S. Capitol, in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, June 4, 2024.
DNC plans to lock in Biden’s nomination early
After a few days of quiet following the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, the campaign by some Democrats to get President Joe Biden to step aside picked up steam again on Wednesday. Rep. Adam Schiff, who's running for the US Senate in California, said he has “serious concerns” about Biden’s ability to win in November. Reports also surfaced Wednesday that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer met last week with Biden to express their concerns about his continued candidacy.
But the Democratic National Committee seems unmoved. In fact, it is reportedly planning to lock in Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee early, via a virtual vote during the first week of August. That would be two weeks before the start of the party convention, where the official nomination typically occurs. The convention’s rules committee is set to hold a meeting on Friday to discuss the matter and will reportedly finalize the plan next week.
Several top Democrats, donors, and mainstream newspapers have suggested Biden should step aside since his disastrous debate performance against Trump in June, opening up party splits at a time when the Republican Party, by contrast, looks strikingly unified behind Trump's candidacy.
Biden, meanwhile, tested positive for COVID late Wednesday and had to cancel a speech in Las Vegas before returning to Delaware to self-isolate with mild symptoms.
We’ll be watching to see if more top Democrats join Schiff, and whether the DNC can prevent a wider split in the party over this issue.