Trump's refusal to regulate tech puts us in a danger we often don't think about

President Donald Trump’s refusal to regulate AI could put Americans at risk of attacks from biological weapons.

In an interview between CBS News contributor Chris Krebs and President Joe Biden’s former adviser Ben Buchanan (who now advises Anthropic), the two men discussed the implications for AI on biological weapons.

"I would look at these current models not as cyber models, but as generally capable models,” Buchanan told Krebs. “They can do expert tasks in a wide variety of areas, not just in cyber, also in bio and the like." As a result, the Biden administration prioritized AI regulation, arguing that “this was something that we were very alert to in the Biden administration. There's a long section on bio in the president's executive order in 2023. There's upside — AI can do a lot for medical discovery — but there also is legitimate concern that AI is outperforming PhD-level virologists on virology questions. And that could abet a bio weapons risk that is not hypothetical."

Krebs then told Buchanan that AI is being inserted into Americans’ lives so rapidly that “we're now entering this governance space where technology development is moving faster than democratic oversight and control can allow or provide."

Krebs added, "They don't really understand the technology. It's very complex, understanding how to meaningfully intervene. That's consistent with the American regulatory tradition — light touch, free markets, capital markets."

Buchanan explained that the Biden administration attempted to address this because they “built a capability at the AI Safety Institute to do quick, voluntary testing of AI systems, including for cyber risk and for bio risk. So I think the tests themselves can go quickly, but that doesn't mean the government is going to do that in a fulsome way. So the jury, I think, is still out on how the president chooses to implement this.”

Buchanan said that, despite Trump’s resistance to meaningful AI regulation, "you are seeing some interesting parallels in direction of travel that's consistent between the administration, the Congress, and Democrats and Republicans, that understands something needs to be done. We're just not quite sure what the mechanisms are just yet."

Despite this push to regulate AI, The Hill’s Miranda Nazzaro wrote that “while several tech leaders are making their relations — both good and bad — with the president public, [OpenAI CEO Sam] Altman has largely kept quiet about the president and the extent of his relationship with him. It comes as OpenAI prepares an initial public offering, and Altman faces his own blowback from the anti-AI movement.” Altman and the other AI executives are reportedly pushing to keep regulations from being applied to their business.

There have been some breaks between the Trump administration and Big AI. Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei ended up in a rift with the Trump administration after they refused to comply with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s demand that they violate their own code of ethics.

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