U.S. Senate and tech titans talk about AI in a private meeting

In an extraordinary closed-door meeting on Wednesday in the U.S. Senate, the nation's top technologists expressed a tentative support for the idea of regulating AI.

At an unusual closed-door conference in the U.S. Senate on Wednesday, the top technology leaders in the country loosely supported the concept of government rules for artificial intelligence. However, there is little agreement on what regulation should look like, and legislation faces a challenging political landscape.

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla; Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta; Bill Gates, the former CEO of Microsoft; and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, were among the executives present.

The private forum on Capitol Hill was organized by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer as part of an effort to legislate artificial intelligence. Nearly two dozen tech executives, supporters, and skeptics were present, and Schumer said he asked everyone in the room whether the government should be involved in the regulation of AI.

Aspects of rapidly evolving technology, how businesses may be more open, and how the U.S. may stay ahead of both China and other nations were some of the topics covered during the discussion.

At the meeting, the tech executives and others presented their points of view. Each speaker had three minutes to cover a subject of their choice. The discussion was then facilitated by Schumer.

According to participants who spoke about it, during the debate, Musk and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt brought up existential concerns posed by AI, while Zuckerberg raised the issue of closed vs. "open source" AI models. Gates mentioned nourishing the hungry. Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, expressed resistance to ideas supported by other businesses that would call for licenses.