“AI is a technology like no other in human history,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on Wednesday in San Francisco. “Advancing AI is the right thing to do, but advancing as quickly as possible, just because we can, without thinking of the consequences, isn’t the smart thing to do.”

Raimondo’s remarks came during the inaugural convening of the International Network of AI Safety Institutes, a network of artificial intelligence safety institutes (AISIs) from 9 nations as well as the European Commission brought together by the U.S. Departments of Commerce and State. The event gathered technical experts from government, industry, academia, and civil society to discuss how to manage the risks posed by increasingly-capable AI systems.

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Raimondo suggested participants keep two principles in mind: “We can’t release models that are going to endanger people,” she said. “Second, let’s make sure AI is serving people, not the other way around.”

Read More: How Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo Became America’s Point Woman on AI

The convening marks a significant step forward in international collaboration on AI governance. The first AISIs emerged last November during the inaugural AI Safety Summit hosted by the UK. Both the U.K. and the U.S. governments announced the formation of their respective AISIs as a means of giving their governments the technical capacity to evaluate the safety of cutting-edge AI models. Other countries followed suit; by May, at another AI Summit in Seoul, Raimondo had announced the creation of the network.

In a joint statement, the members of the International Network of AI Safety Institutes—which includes AISIs from the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada, France, Japan, Kenya, South Korea, and Singapore—laid out their mission: “to be a forum that brings together technical expertise from around the world,” “…to facilitate a common technical understanding of AI safety risks and mitigations based upon the work of our institutes and of the broader scientific community,” and “…to encourage a general understanding of and approach to AI safety globally, that will enable the benefits of AI innovation to be shared amongst countries at all stages of development.”

In the lead-up to the convening, the U.S. AISI, which serves as the network’s inaugural chair, also announced a new government taskforce focused on the technology’s national security risks. The Testing Risks of AI for National Security (TRAINS) Taskforce brings together representatives from the Departments of Defense, Energy, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services. It will be chaired by the U.S. AISI, and aim to “identify, measure, and manage the emerging national security and public safety implications of rapidly evolving AI technology,” with a particular focus on radiological and nuclear security, chemical and biological security, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, and conventional military capabilities.

The push for international cooperation comes at a time of increasing tension around AI development between the U.S. and China, whose absence from the network is notable. In remarks pre-recorded for the convening, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer emphasized the importance of ensuring that the Chinese Communist Party does not get to “write the rules of the road.” Earlier Wednesday, Chinese lab Deepseek announced a new “reasoning” model thought to be the first to rival OpenAI’s own reasoning model, o1, which the company says is “designed to spend more time thinking” before it responds.

On Tuesday, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which has provided annual recommendations to Congress since 2000, recommended that Congress establish and fund a “Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to racing to and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capability,” which the commission defined as “systems as good as or better than human capabilities across all cognitive domains” that “would surpass the sharpest human minds at every task.”

Many experts in the field, such as Geoffrey Hinton, who earlier this year won a Nobel Prize in physics for his work on artificial intelligence, have expressed concerns that, should AGI be developed, humanity may not be able to control it, which could lead to catastrophic harm. In a panel discussion at Wednesday’s event, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei—who believes AGI-like systems could arrive as soon as 2026—cited “loss of control” risks as a serious concern, alongside the risks that future, more capable models are misused by malicious actors to perpetrate bioterrorism or undermine cybersecurity. Responding to a question, Amodei expressed unequivocal support for making the testing of advanced AI systems mandatory, noting “we also need to be really careful about how we do it.”

Meanwhile, practical international collaboration on AI safety is advancing. Earlier in the week, the U.S. and U.K. AISIs shared preliminary findings from their pre-deployment evaluation of an advanced AI model—the upgraded version of Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The evaluation focused on assessing the model’s biological and cyber capabilities, as well as its performance on software and development tasks, and the efficacy of the safeguards built into it to prevent the model from responding to harmful requests. Both the U.K. and U.S. AISIs found that these safeguards could be “routinely circumvented,” which they noted is “consistent with prior research on the vulnerability of other AI systems’ safeguards.”

The San Francisco convening set out three priority topics that stand to “urgently benefit from international collaboration”: managing risks from synthetic content, testing foundation models, and conducting risk assessments for advanced AI systems. Ahead of the convening, $11 million of funding was announced to support research into how best to mitigate risks from synthetic content (such as the generation and distribution of child sexual abuse material, and the facilitation of fraud and impersonation). The funding was provided by a mix of government agencies and philanthropic organizations, including the Republic of Korea and the Knight Foundation.

While it is unclear how the election victory of Donald Trump will impact the future of the U.S. AISI and American AI policy more broadly, international collaboration on the topic of AI safety is set to continue. The U.K. AISI is hosting another San Francisco-based conference this week, in partnership with the Centre for the Governance of AI, “to accelerate the design and implementation of frontier AI safety frameworks.” And in February, France will host its “AI Action Summit,” following the Summits held in Seoul in May and in the U.K. last November. The 2025 AI Action Summit will gather leaders from the public and private sectors, academia, and civil society, as actors across the world seek to find ways to govern the technology as its capabilities accelerate.

Raimondo on Wednesday emphasized the importance of integrating safety with innovation when it comes to something as rapidly advancing and as powerful as AI. “It has the potential to replace the human mind,” she said. “Safety is good for innovation. Safety breeds trust. Trust speeds adoption. Adoption leads to more innovation. We need that virtuous cycle.”

When Donald Trump was last President, ChatGPT had not yet been launched. Now, as he prepares to return to the White House after defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, the artificial intelligence landscape looks quite different.

AI systems are advancing so rapidly that some leading executives of AI companies, such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO and a prominent Trump backer, believe AI may become smarter than humans by 2026. Others offer a more general timeframe. In an essay published in September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, “It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days,” but also noted that “it may take longer.” Meanwhile, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees the arrival of these systems as more of a gradual process rather than a single moment.

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Either way, such advances could have far-reaching implications for national security, the economy, and the global balance of power.

Read More: When Might AI Outsmart Us? It Depends Who You Ask

Trump’s own pronouncements on AI have fluctuated between awe and apprehension. In a June interview on Logan Paul’s Impaulsive podcast, he described AI as a “superpower” and called its capabilities “alarming.” And like many in Washington, he views the technology through the lens of competition with China, which he sees as the “primary threat” in the race to build advanced AI.

Yet even his closest allies are divided on how to govern the technology: Musk has long voiced concerns about AI’s existential risks, while J.D. Vance, Trump’s Vice President, sees such warnings from industry as a ploy to usher regulations that would “entrench the tech incumbents.” These divisions among Trump’s confidants hint at the competing pressures that will shape AI policy during Trump’s second term.

Undoing Biden’s AI legacy

Trump’s first major AI policy move will likely be to repeal President Joe Biden’s Executive Order on AI. The sweeping order, signed in October 2023, sought to address threats the technology could pose to civil rights, privacy, and national security, while promoting innovation, competition, and the use of AI for public services.

Trump promised to repeal the Executive Order on the campaign trail in December 2023, and this position was reaffirmed in the Republican Party platform in July, which criticized the executive order for hindering innovation and imposing “radical leftwing ideas” on the technology’s development.

Read more: Republicans’ Vow to Repeal Biden’s AI Executive Order Has Some Experts Worried

Sections of the Executive Order which focus on racial discrimination or inequality are “not as much Trump’s style,” says Dan Hendrycks, executive and research director of the Center for AI Safety. While experts have criticized any rollback of bias protections, Hendrycks says the Trump Administration may preserve other aspects of Biden’s approach. “I think there’s stuff in [the Executive Order] that’s very bipartisan, and then there’s some other stuff that’s more specifically Democrat-flavored,” Hendrycks says.

“It would not surprise me if a Trump executive order on AI maintained or even expanded on some of the core national security provisions within the Biden Executive Order, building on what the Department of Homeland Security has done for evaluating cybersecurity, biological, and radiological risks associated with AI,” says Samuel Hammond, a senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, a technology-focused think tank.

The fate of the U.S. AI Safety Institute (AISI), an institution created last November by the Biden Administration to lead the government’s efforts on AI safety, also remains uncertain. In August, the AISI signed agreements with OpenAI and Anthropic to formally collaborate on AI safety research, and on the testing and evaluation of new models. “Almost certainly, the AI Safety Institute is viewed as an inhibitor to innovation, which doesn’t necessarily align with the rest of what appears to be Trump’s tech and AI agenda,” says Keegan McBride, a lecturer in AI, government, and policy at the Oxford Internet Institute. But Hammond says that while some fringe voices would move to shutter the institute, “most Republicans are supportive of the AISI. They see it as an extension of our leadership in AI.”

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Congress is already working on protecting the AISI. In October, a broad coalition of companies, universities, and civil society groups—including OpenAI, Lockheed Martin, Carnegie Mellon University, and the nonprofit Encode Justice—signed a letter calling on key figures in Congress to urgently establish a legislative basis for the AISI. Efforts are underway in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, and both reportedly have “pretty wide bipartisan support,” says Hamza Chaudhry, U.S. policy specialist at the nonprofit Future of Life Institute.

America-first AI and the race against China

Trump’s previous comments suggest that maintaining the U.S.’s lead in AI development will be a key focus for his Administration.“We have to be at the forefront,” he said on the Impaulsive podcast in June. “We have to take the lead over China.” Trump also framed environmental concerns as potential obstacles, arguing they could “hold us back” in what he views as the race against China.

Trump’s AI policy could include rolling back regulations to accelerate infrastructure development, says Dean Ball, a research fellow at George Mason University. “There’s the data centers that are going to have to be built. The energy to power those data centers is going to be immense. I think even bigger than that: chip production,” he says. “We’re going to need a lot more chips.” While Trump’s campaign has at times attacked the CHIPS Act, which provides incentives for chip makers manufacturing in the U.S, leading some analysts to believe that he is unlikely to repeal the act. 

Read more: What Donald Trump’s Win Means for the Economy

Chip export restrictions are likely to remain a key lever in U.S. AI policy. Building on measures he initiated during his first term—which were later expanded by Biden—Trump may well  strengthen controls that curb China’s access to advanced semiconductors. “It’s fair to say that the Biden Administration has been pretty tough on China, but I’m sure Trump wants to be seen as tougher,” McBride says. It is “quite likely” that Trump’s White House will “double down” on export controls in an effort to close gaps that have allowed China to access chips, says Scott Singer, a visiting scholar in the Technology and International Affairs Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The overwhelming majority of people on both sides think that the export controls are important,” he says.

The rise of open-source AI presents new challenges. China has shown it can leverage U.S. systems, as demonstrated when Chinese researchers reportedly adapted an earlier version of Meta’s Llama model for military applications. That’s created a policy divide. “You’ve got people in the GOP that are really in favor of open-source,” Ball says. “And then you have people who are ‘China hawks’ and really want to forbid open-source at the frontier of AI.”

“My sense is that because a Trump platform has so much conviction in the importance and value of open-source I’d be surprised to see a movement towards restriction,” Singer says.

Despite his tough talk, Trump’s deal-making impulses could shape his policy towards China. “I think people misunderstand Trump as a China hawk. He doesn’t hate China,” Hammond says, describing Trump’s “transactional” view of international relations. In 2018, Trump lifted restrictions on Chinese technology company ZTE in exchange for a $1.3 billion fine and increased oversight. Singer sees similar possibilities for AI negotiations, particularly if Trump accepts concerns held by many experts about AI’s more extreme risks, such as the chance that humanity may lose control over future systems.

Read more: U.S. Voters Value Safe AI Development Over Racing Against China, Poll Shows

Trump’s coalition is divided over AI

Debates over how to govern AI reveal deep divisions within Trump’s coalition of supporters. Leading figures, including Vance, favor looser regulations of the technology. Vance has dismissed AI risk as an industry ploy to usher in new regulations that would “make it actually harder for new entrants to create the innovation that’s going to power the next generation of American growth.”

Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who served on Trump’s 2016 transition team, recently cautioned against movements to regulate AI. Speaking at the Cambridge Union in May, he said any government with the authority to govern the technology would have a “global totalitarian character.” Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, gave $2.5 million to a pro-Trump super political action committee, and an additional $844,600 to Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party.

Yet, a more safety-focused perspective has found other supporters in Trump’s orbit. Hammond, who advised on the AI policy committee for Project 2025, a proposed policy agenda led by right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation, and not officially endorsed by the Trump campaign, says that “within the people advising that project, [there was a] very clear focus on artificial general intelligence and catastrophic risks from AI.”

Musk, who has emerged as a prominent Trump campaign ally through both his donations and his promotion of Trump on his platform X (formerly Twitter), has long been concerned that AI could pose an existential threat to humanity. Recently, Musk said he believes there’s a 10% to 20% chance that AI “goes bad.” In August, Musk posted on X supporting the now-vetoed California AI safety bill that would have put guardrails on AI developers. Hendrycks, whose organization co-sponsored the California bill, and who serves as safety adviser at xAI, Musk’s AI company, says “If Elon is making suggestions on AI stuff, then I expect it to go well.” However, “there’s a lot of basic appointments and groundwork to do, which makes it a little harder to predict,” he says.

Trump has acknowledged some of the national security risks of AI. In June, he said he feared deepfakes of a U.S. President threatening a nuclear strike could prompt another state to respond, sparking a nuclear war. He also gestured to the idea that an AI system could “go rogue” and overpower humanity, but took care to distinguish this position from his personal view. However, for Trump, competition with China appears to remain the primary concern.

Read more: Trump Worries AI Deepfakes Could Trigger Nuclear War

But these priorities aren’t necessarily at odds and AI safety regulation does not inherently entail ceding ground to China, Hendrycks says. He notes that safeguards against malicious use require minimal investment from developers. “You have to hire one person to spend, like, a month or two on engineering, and then you get your jailbreaking safeguards,” he says. But with these competing voices shaping Trump’s AI agenda, the direction of Trump’s AI policy agenda remains uncertain.

“In terms of which viewpoint President Trump and his team side towards, I think that is an open question, and that’s just something we’ll have to see,” says Chaudhry. “Now is a pivotal moment.”

Today’s best AI models, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, come with conditions: their creators control the terms on which they are accessed to prevent them being used in harmful ways. This is in contrast with ‘open’ models, which can be downloaded, modified, and used by anyone for almost any purpose. A new report by non-profit research organization Epoch AI found that open models available today are about a year behind the top closed models.

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“The best open model today is on par with closed models in performance, but with a lag of about one year,” says Ben Cottier, lead researcher on the report.

Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B, an open model released in July, took about 16 months to match the capabilities of the first version of GPT-4. If Meta’s next generation AI, Llama 4, is released as an open model, as it is widely expected to be, this gap could shrink even further. The findings come as policymakers grapple with how to deal with increasingly-powerful AI systems, which have already been reshaping information environments ahead of elections across the world, and which some experts worry could one day be capable of engineering pandemics, executing sophisticated cyberattacks, and causing other harms to humans.

Researchers at Epoch AI analyzed hundreds of notable models released since 2018. To arrive at their results, they measured the performance of top models on technical benchmarks—standardized tests that measure an AI’s ability to handle tasks like solving math problems, answering general knowledge questions, and demonstrating logical reasoning. They also looked at how much computing power, or compute, was used to train them, since that has historically been a good proxy for capabilities, though open models can sometimes perform as well as closed models while using less compute, thanks to advancements in the efficiency of AI algorithms. “The lag between open and closed models provides a window for policymakers and AI labs to assess frontier capabilities before they become available in open models,” Epoch researchers write in the report.

Read More: The Researcher Trying to Glimpse the Future of AI

But the distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ AI models is not as simple as it might appear. While Meta describes its Llama models as open-source, it doesn’t meet the new definition published last month by the Open Source Initiative, which has historically set the industry standard for what constitutes open source. The new definition requires companies to share not just the model itself, but also the data and code used to train it. While Meta releases its model “weights”—long lists of numbers that allow users to download and modify the model—it doesn’t release either the training data or the code used to train the models. Before downloading a model, users must agree to an Acceptable Use Policy that prohibits military use and other harmful or illegal activities, although once models are downloaded, these restrictions are difficult to enforce in practice.

Meta says it disagrees with the Open Source Initiative’s new definition. “There is no single open source AI definition, and defining it is a challenge because previous open source definitions do not encompass the complexities of today’s rapidly advancing AI models,” a Meta spokesperson told TIME in an emailed statement. “We make Llama free and openly available, and our license and Acceptable Use Policy help keep people safe by having some restrictions in place. We will continue working with OSI and other industry groups to make AI more accessible and free responsibly, regardless of technical definitions.”

Making AI models open is widely seen to be beneficial because it democratizes access to technology and drives innovation and competition. “One of the key things that open communities do is they get a wider, geographically more-dispersed, and more diverse community involved in AI development,” says Elizabeth Seger, director of digital policy at Demos, a U.K.-based think tank. Open communities, which include academic researchers, independent developers, and non-profit AI labs, also drive innovation through collaboration, particularly in making technical processes more efficient. “They don’t have the same resources to play with as Big Tech companies, so being able to do a lot more with a lot less is really important,” says Seger. In India, for example, “AI that’s built into public service delivery is almost completely built off of open source models,” she says. 

Open models also enable greater transparency and accountability. “There needs to be an open version of any model that becomes basic infrastructure for society, because we do need to know where the problems are coming from,” says Yacine Jernite, machine learning and society lead at Hugging Face, a company that maintains the digital infrastructure where many open models are hosted. He points to the example of Stable Diffusion 2, an open image generation model that allowed researchers and critics to examine its training data and push back against potential biases or copyright infringements—something impossible with closed models like OpenAI’s DALL-E. “You can do that much more easily when you have the receipts and the traces,” he says.

Read More: The Heated Debate Over Who Should Control Access to AI

However, the fact that open models can be used by anyone creates inherent risks, as people with malicious intentions can use them for harm, such as producing child sexual abuse material, or they could even be used by rival states. Last week, Reuters reported that Chinese research institutions linked to the People’s Liberation Army had used an old version of Meta’s Llama model to develop an AI tool for military use, underscoring the fact that, once a model has been publicly released, it cannot be recalled. Chinese companies such as Alibaba have also developed their own open models, which are reportedly competitive with their American counterparts.

On Monday, Meta announced it would make its Llama models available to U.S. government agencies, including those working on defense and national security applications, and to private companies supporting government work, such as Lockeed Martin, Anduril, and Palantir. The company argues that American leadership in open-source AI is both economically advantageous and crucial for global security.

Closed proprietary models present their own challenges. While they are more secure, because access is controlled by their developers, they are also more opaque. Third parties cannot inspect the data on which the models are trained to search for bias, copyrighted material, and other issues. Organizations using AI to process sensitive data may choose to avoid closed models due to privacy concerns. And while these models have stronger guardrails built in to prevent misuse, many people have found ways to ‘jailbreak’ them, effectively circumventing these guardrails.

Governance challenges

At present, the safety of closed models is primarily in the hands of private companies, although government institutions such as the U.S. AI Safety Institute (AISI) are increasingly playing a role in safety-testing models ahead of their release. In August, the U.S. AISI signed formal agreements with Anthropic to enable “formal collaboration on AI safety research, testing and evaluation”.

Because of the lack of centralized control, open models present distinct governance challenges—particularly in relation to the most extreme risks that future AI systems could pose, such as empowering bioterrorists or enhancing cyberattacks. How policymakers should respond depends on whether the capabilities gap between open and closed models is shrinking or widening. “If the gap keeps getting wider, then when we talk about frontier AI safety, we don’t have to worry so much about open ecosystems, because anything we see is going to be happening with closed models first, and those are easier to regulate,” says Seger. “However, if that gap is going to get narrower, then we need to think a lot harder about if and how and when to regulate open model development, which is an entire other can of worms, because there’s no central, regulatable entity.”

For companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, selling access to their models is central to their business model. “A key difference between Meta and closed model providers is that selling access to AI models isn’t our business model,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an open letter in July. “We expect future Llama models to become the most advanced in the industry. But even before that, Llama is already leading on openness, modifiability, and cost efficiency.”

Measuring the abilities of AI systems is not straightforward. “Capabilities is not a term that’s defined in any way, shape or form, which makes it a terrible thing to discuss without common vocabulary,” says Jernite. “There are many things you can do with open models that you can’t do with closed models,” he says, emphasizing that open models can be adapted to a range of use-cases, and that they may outperform closed models when trained for specific tasks.

Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and popular commentator on the technology, argues that even if there was no further progress in AI, it would likely take years before these systems are fully integrated into our world. With new capabilities being added to AI systems at a steady rate—in October, frontier AI lab Anthropic introduced the ability for its model to directly control a computer, still in beta—the complexity of governing this technology will only increase. 

In response, Seger says that it is vital to tease out exactly what risks are at stake. “We need to establish very clear threat models outlining what the harm is and how we expect openness to lead to the realization of that harm, and then figure out the best point along those individual threat models for intervention.”

The number of people living in urban areas has tripled in the last 50 years, meaning when a major natural disaster such as an earthquake strikes a city, more lives are in danger. Meanwhile, the strength and frequency of extreme weather events has increased—a trend set to continue as the climate warms. That is spurring efforts around the world to develop a new generation of earthquake monitoring and climate forecasting systems to make detecting and responding to disasters quicker, cheaper, and more accurate than ever.

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On Nov. 6, at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center​ in Spain, the Global Initiative on Resilience to Natural Hazards through AI Solutions will meet for the first time. The new United Nations initiative aims to guide governments, organizations, and communities in using AI for disaster management.

The initiative builds on nearly four years of groundwork laid by the International Telecommunications Union, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the U.N. Environment Programme, which in early 2021 collectively convened a focus group to begin developing best practices for AI use in disaster management. These include enhancing data collection, improving forecasting, and streamlining communications.

Read more: Cities Are on the Front Line of the ‘Climate-Health Crisis.’ A New Report Provides a Framework for Tackling Its Effects

“What I find exciting is, for one type of hazard, there are so many different ways that AI can be applied and this creates a lot of opportunities,” says Monique Kuglitsch, who chaired the focus group. Take hurricanes for example: In 2023, researchers showed AI could help policymakers identify the best places to put traffic sensors to detect road blockages after tropical storms in Tallahassee, Fla. And in October, meteorologists used AI weather forecasting models to accurately predict that Hurricane Milton would land near Siesta Key, Florida. AI is also being used to alert members of the public more efficiently. Last year, The National Weather Service announced a partnership with AI translation company Lilt to help deliver forecasts in Spanish and simplified Chinese, which it says can reduce the time to translate a hurricane warning from an hour to 10 minutes.

Besides helping communities prepare for disasters, AI is also being used to coordinate response efforts. Following both Hurricane Milton and Hurricane Ian, non-profit GiveDirectly used Google’s machine learning models to analyze pre- and post-satellite images to identify the worst affected areas, and prioritize cash grants accordingly. Last year AI analysis of aerial images was deployed in cities like Quelimane, Mozambique, after Cyclone Freddy and Adıyaman, Turkey, after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake, to aid response efforts.

Read more: How Meteorologists Are Using AI to Forecast Hurricane Milton and Other Storms

Operating early warning systems is primarily a governmental responsibility, but AI climate modeling—and, to a lesser extent, earthquake detection—has become a burgeoning private industry. Start-up SeismicAI says it’s working with the civil protection agencies in the Mexican states of Guerrero and Jalisco to deploy an AI-enhanced network of sensors, which would detect earthquakes in real-time. Tech giants Google, Nvidia, and Huawei are partnering with European forecasters and say their AI-driven models can generate accurate medium-term forecasts thousands of times more quickly than traditional models, while being less computationally intensive. And in September, IBM partnered with NASA to release a general-purpose open-source model that can be used for various climate-modeling cases, and which runs on a desktop.

AI advances

While machine learning techniques have been incorporated into weather forecasting models for many years, recent advances have allowed many new models to be built using AI from the ground-up, improving the accuracy and speed of forecasting. Traditional models, which rely on complex physics-based equations to simulate interactions between water and air in the atmosphere and require supercomputers to run, can take hours to generate a single forecast. In contrast, AI weather models learn to spot patterns by training on decades of climate data, most of which was collected via satellites and ground-based sensors and shared through intergovernmental collaboration.

Both AI and physics-based forecasts work by dividing the world into a three-dimensional grid of boxes and then determining variables like temperature and wind speed. But because AI models are more computationally efficient, they can create much finer-grained grids. For example, the the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ highest resolution model breaks the world into 5.5 mile boxes, whereas forecasting startup Atmo offers models finer than one square mile. This bump in resolution can allow for more efficient allocation of resources during extreme weather events, which is particularly important for cities, says Johan Mathe, co-founder and CTO of the company, which earlier this year inked deals with the Philippines and the island nation of Tuvalu.

Limitations

AI-driven models are typically only as good as the data they are trained on, which can be a limiting factor in some places. “When you’re in a really high stakes situation, like a disaster, you need to be able to rely on the model output,” says Kuglitsch. Poorer regions—often on the frontlines of climate-related disasters—typically have fewer and worse-maintained weather sensors, for example, creating gaps in meteorological data. AI systems trained on this skewed data can be less accurate in the places most vulnerable to disasters. And unlike physics-based models, which follow set rules, as AI models become more complex, they increasingly operate as sophisticated ‘black boxes,’ where the path from input to output becomes less transparent. The U.N. initiative’s focus is on developing guidelines for using AI responsibly. Kuglitsch says standards could, for example, encourage developers to disclose a model’s limitations or ensure systems work across regional boundaries.

The initiative will test its recommendations in the field by collaborating with the Mediterranean and pan-European forecast and Early Warning System Against natural hazards (MedEWSa), a project that spun out of the focus group. “We’re going to be applying the best practices from the focus group and getting a feedback loop going, to figure out which of the best practices are easiest to follow,” Kuglitsch says. One MedEWSa pilot project will explore machine learning to predict the occurrence of wildfires an area around Athens, Greece. Another will use AI to improve flooding and landslide warnings in the area surrounding Tbilisi city, Georgia.

Read more: How the Cement Industry Is Creating Carbon-Negative Building Materials

Meanwhile, private companies like Tomorrow.io are seeking to plug these gaps by collecting their own data. The AI weather forecasting start-up has launched satellites with radar and other meteorological sensors to collect data from regions that lack ground-based sensors, which it combines with historical data to train its models. Tomorrow.io’s technology is being used by New England cities including Boston, to help city officials decide when to salt the roads ahead of snowfall. It’s also used by Uber and Delta Airlines.

Another U.N. initiative, the Systematic Observations Financing Facility (SOFF), also aims to close the weather data gap by providing financing and technical assistance in poorer countries. Johan Stander, director of services for the WMO, one of SOFF’s partners, says the WMO is working with private AI developers including Google and Microsoft, but stresses the importance of not handing off too much responsibility to AI systems.

“You can’t go to a machine and say, ‘OK, you were wrong. Answer me, what’s going on?’ You still need somebody to take that ownership,” he says. He sees private companies’ role as “supporting the national met services, instead of trying to take them over.”

On Wednesday, luminaries in the field of AI gathered at Serpentine North, a former gunpowder store turned exhibition space, for the inaugural TIME100 Impact Dinner London. Following a similar event held in San Francisco last month, the dinner convened influential leaders, experts, and honorees of TIME’s 2023 and 2024 100 Influential People in AI lists—all of whom are playing a role in shaping the future of the technology.

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Following a discussion between TIME’s CEO Jessica Sibley and executives from the event’s sponsors—Rosanne Kincaid-Smith, group chief operating officer at Northern Data Group, and Jaap Zuiderveld, Nvidia’s VP of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa—and after the main course had been served, attention turned to a panel discussion.

The panel featured TIME 100 AI honorees Jade Leung, CTO at the U.K. AI Safety Institute, an institution established last year to evaluate the capabilities of cutting-edge AI models; Victor Riparbelli, CEO and co-founder of the UK-based AI video communications company Synthesia; and Abeba Birhane, a cognitive scientist and adjunct assistant professor at the School of Computer Science and Statistics at Trinity College Dublin, whose research focuses on auditing AI models to uncover empirical harms. Moderated by TIME senior editor Ayesha Javed, the discussion focused on the current state of AI and its associated challenges, the question of who bears responsibility for AI’s impacts, and the potential of AI-generated videos to transform how we communicate.

The panelists’ views on the risks posed by AI reflected their various focus areas. For Leung, whose work involves assessing whether cutting-edge AI models could be used to facilitate cyber, biological or chemical attacks, and evaluating models for any other harmful capabilities more broadly, focus was on the need to “get our heads around the empirical data that will tell us much more about what’s coming down the pike and what kind of risks are associated with it.”

Birhane, meanwhile, emphasized what she sees as the “massive hype” around AI’s capabilities and potential to pose existential risk. “These models don’t actually live up to their claims.” Birhane argued that “AI is not just computational calculations. It’s the entire pipeline that makes it possible to build and to sustain systems,” citing the importance of paying attention to where data comes from, the environmental impacts of AI systems (particularly in relation to their energy and water use), and the underpaid labor of data-labellers as examples. “There has to be an incentive for both big companies and for startups to do thorough evaluations on not just the models themselves, but the entire AI pipeline,” she said. Riparbelli suggested that both “fixing the problems already in society today” and thinking about “Terminator-style scenarios” are important, and worth paying attention to.

Panelists agreed on the vital importance of evaluations for AI systems, both to understand their capabilities and to discern their shortfalls when it comes to issues, such as the perpetuation of prejudice. Because of the complexity of the technology and the speed at which the field is moving, “best practices for how you deal with different safety challenges change very quickly,” Leung said, pointing to a “big asymmetry between what is known publicly to academics and to civil society, and what is known within these companies themselves.”

The panelists further agreed that both companies and governments have a role to play in minimizing the risks posed by AI. “There’s a huge onus on companies to continue to innovate on safety practices,” said Leung. Riparbelli agreed, suggesting companies may have a “moral imperative” to ensure their systems are safe. At the same time, “governments have to play a role here. That’s completely non-negotiable,” said Leung.

Equally, Birhane was clear that “effective regulation” based on “empirical evidence” is necessary. “A lot of governments and policy makers see AI as an opportunity, a way to develop the economy for financial gain,” she said, pointing to tensions between economic incentives and the interests of disadvantaged groups. “Governments need to see evaluations and regulation as a mechanism to create better AI systems, to benefit the general public and people at the bottom of society.”

When it comes to global governance, Leung emphasized the need for clarity on what kinds of guardrails would be most desirable, from both a technical and policy perspective. “What are the best practices, standards, and protocols that we want to harmonize across jurisdictions?” she asked. “It’s not a sufficiently-resourced question.” Still, Leung pointed to the fact that China was party to last year’s AI Safety Summit hosted by the U.K. as cause for optimism. “It’s very important to make sure that they’re around the table,” she said. 

One concrete area where we can observe the advance of AI capabilities in real-time is AI-generated video. In a synthetic video created by his company’s technology, Riparbelli’s AI double declared “text as a technology is ultimately transitory and will become a relic of the past.” Expanding on the thought, the real Riparbelli said: “We’ve always strived towards more intuitive, direct ways of communication. Text was the original way we could store and encode information and share time and space. Now we live in a world where for most consumers, at least, they prefer to watch and listen to their content.” 

He envisions a world where AI bridges the gap between text, which is quick to create, and video, which is more labor-intensive but also more engaging. AI will “enable anyone to create a Hollywood film from their bedroom without needing more than their imagination,” he said. This technology poses obvious challenges in terms of its ability to be abused, for example by creating deepfakes or spreading misinformation, but Riparbelli emphasizes that his company takes steps to prevent this, noting that “every video, before it gets generated, goes through a content moderation process where we make sure it fits within our content policies.”

Riparbelli suggests that rather than a “technology-centric” approach to regulation on AI, the focus should be on designing policies that reduce harmful outcomes. “Let’s focus on the things we don’t want to happen and regulate around those.”

The TIME100 Impact Dinner London: Leaders Shaping the Future of AI was presented by Northern Data Group and Nvidia Europe.

Will.i.am has been embracing innovative technology for years. Now he is using artificial intelligence in an effort to transform how we listen to the radio.

The musician, entrepreneur and tech investor has launched RAiDiO.FYI, a set of interactive radio stations themed around topics like sport, pop culture, and politics. Each station is fundamentally interactive: tune in and you’ll be welcomed by name by an AI host “live from the ether,” the Black Eyed Peas frontman tells TIME. Hosts talk about their given topic before playing some music. Unlike previous AI-driven musical products, such as Spotify’s AI DJ, RAiDiO.FYI permits two-way communication: At any point you can press a button to speak with the AI persona about whatever comes to mind.

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The stations can be accessed on FYI—which stands for Focus Your Ideas—a communication and collaboration app created by FYI.AI, founded by will.i.am in 2020. Each station exists as a “project” within the app. All the relevant content, including the AI host’s script, music, and segments, are loaded in as a “mega prompt” from which the tool—powered by third-party large language models—can draw. AI personas also have limited web browsing capabilities and can pull information from trusted news sources.

“This is Act One”, will.i.am told TIME while demonstrating RAiDiO.FYI on Aug. 20, National Radio Day in the U.S. While most of the nine currently-available stations have been created by the FYI.AI team, “Act Two,” he says, involves partnerships with creators across the entertainment and media industries.

One such partnership has already been struck with the media platform Earn Your Leisure, to promote the organization’s upcoming “Invest Fest” conference in Atlanta. At the event, a “hyper-curated” station is intended to replace the traditional pamphlet or email that might contain all relevant conference information, like speaker profiles and the event’s lineup. Instead, will.i.am explains, the conference organizers can feed all those details—as well as further information, such as the content of speeches—to the AI station, where it can be interacted with directly.

Will.i.am envisions this idea of an interactive text-to-station applying broadly, beyond just radio and conferencing. “It could be learning for tutors and teachers. It could be books for authors. It could be podcast segments for podcasters. It can be whatever it is the owner of that project [wants] when we partner with them to create that station,” he says, emphasizing that the platform creates fresh possibilities for how people engage with content. “It’s liberating for the content maker, because if you had your sponsorships and your advertiser partners, you’re the one who’s deciding who’s on your broadcast.”

This is not will.i.am’s first foray into the world of AI. The artist, who has been using technology to make music for decades, started thinking seriously about the subject in 2004, when he was introduced to its possibilities by pioneering professor and AI expert Patrick Winston. In January, he launched a radio show on SiriusXM that he co-hosts with an AI called Qd.pi.

He also sits on the World Economic Forum’s Fourth Industrial Revolution Advisory Committee and regularly attends the organization’s annual meetings in Davos to discuss how technology shapes society. He previously served as chip manufacturer Intel’s director of creative innovation, and in 2009 launched the i.am Angel Foundation to support young people studying computer science and robotics in the Los Angeles neighborhood where he was raised.

The Black Eyed Peas’ 2010 music video for the song “Imma Be Rocking That Body” begins with a skit where will.i.am shows off futuristic technology that can replicate any artist’s voice, to his bandmates’ dismay. That technology is now possible today. FYI’s AI personas may still have the distinctive sound of an AI voice and—like most large language models—have the potential to be influenced by malicious prompting, yet they offer a glimpse into the future that is already here. And it won’t be long before it is not just the station hosts, but the music itself that is AI-generated, will.i.am says.

On August 7, a group of renowned professors co-authored a letter urging key lawmakers to support a California AI bill as it enters the final stages of the state’s legislative process. In a letter shared exclusively with TIME, Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Lawrence Lessig, and Stuart Russell argue that the next generation of AI systems pose “severe risks” if “developed without sufficient care and oversight,” and describe the bill as the “bare minimum for effective regulation of this technology.”

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The bill, titled the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act, was introduced by Senator Scott Wiener in February of this year. It requires AI companies training large-scale models to conduct rigorous safety testing for potentially dangerous capabilities and implement comprehensive safety measures to mitigate risks.

“There are fewer regulations on AI systems that could pose catastrophic risks than on sandwich shops or hairdressers,“ the four experts write.

The letter is addressed to the respective leaders of the legislative bodies the bill must pass through if it is to become law: Mike McGuire, the president pro tempore of California’s senate, where the bill passed in May; Robert Rivas, speaker of the state assembly, where the bill will face a vote later this month; and state Governor Gavin Newsom, who—if the bill passes in the assembly—must sign or veto the proposed legislation by the end of September.

With Congress gridlocked and Republicans pledging to reverse Biden’s AI executive order if elected in November, California—the world’s fifth-largest economy and home to many of the world’s leading AI developers—plays what the authors see as an “indispensable role” in regulating AI. If passed, the bill would apply to all companies operating in the state.

While polls suggest the bill is supported by the majority of Californians, it has been subject to harsh opposition from industry groups and tech investors, who claim it would stifle innovation, harm the open-source community, and “let China take the lead on AI development.” Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has been particularly critical of the bill, setting up a website that urges citizens to write to the legislature in opposition. Others, such as startup incubator YCombinator, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun, and Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li (whose new $1 billion startup has received funding from Andreessen Horowitz) have also been vocal in their opposition.

The pushback has centered around provisions in the bill which would compel developers to provide reasonable assurances that an AI model will not pose unreasonable risk of causing “critical harms,” such as aiding in the creation of weapons of mass destruction or causing severe damage to critical infrastructure. The bill would only apply to systems that both cost over $100 million dollars to train and are trained using an amount of computing power above a specified threshold. These dual requirements imply the bill would likely only affect the largest AI developers. “No currently existing system would be classified,” Lennart Heim, a researcher at the RAND Corporation’s Technology and Security Policy Center, told TIME in June.

“As some of the experts who understand these systems most, we can say confidently that these risks are probable and significant enough to make safety testing and common-sense precautions necessary,” the authors of the letter write. Bengio and Hinton, who have previously supported the bill, are both winners of the Turing Award, and often referred to as “godfathers of AI,” alongside Yann LeCun. Russell has written a textbook—Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach—that is widely considered to be the standard textbook on AI. And Lessig, a Professor of Law at Harvard, is broadly regarded as a founding figure of Internet law and a pioneer in the free culture movement, having founded the Creative Commons and authored influential books on copyright and technology law. In addition to the risks noted above, they cite risks posed by autonomous AI agents that could act without human oversight among their concerns.

Read More: Yoshua Bengio Is on the 2024 TIME100 List

“I worry that technology companies will not solve these significant risks on their own while locked in their race for market share and profit maximization. That’s why we need some rules for those who are at the frontier of this race,” Bengio told TIME over email.  

The letter rejects the notion that the bill would hamper innovation, stating that as written, the bill only applies to the largest AI models; that large AI developers have already made voluntary commitments to undertake many of the safety measures outlined in the bill; and that similar regulations in Europe and China are in fact more restrictive than SB 1047. It also praises the bill for its “robust whistleblower protections” for AI lab employees who report safety concerns, which are increasingly seen as necessary given reports of reckless behavior on the part of some labs.

In an interview with Vox last month, Senator Wiener noted that the bill has already been amended in response to criticism from the open-source community. The current version exempts original developers from shutdown requirements once a model is no longer in their control, and limits their liability when others make significant modifications to their models, effectively treating significantly modified versions as new models. Despite this, some critics believe the bill would require open-source models to have a “kill switch.”

“Relative to the scale of risks we are facing, this is a remarkably light-touch piece of legislation,” the letter says, noting that the bill does not have a licensing regime or require companies to receive permission from a government agency before training a model, and relies on self-assessments of risk. The authors further write: “It would be a historic mistake to strike out the basic measures of this bill.” 

Over email, Lessig adds “Governor Newsom will have the opportunity to cement California as a national first-mover in regulating AI. Legislation in California would meet an urgent need. With a critical mass of the top AI firms based in California, there is no better place to take an early lead on regulating this emerging technology.”