The White House has today invited the heads of the most advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies – Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic – for a “frank discussion about the risks” associated with these technologies with several members of the administration, including whose vice president Kamala Harris.

“Our aim is to have an honest discussion about the current and near-term risks we see in AI developments,” reads the invitation to the discussion, accessed by AFP on Tuesday.

The US government also wants to consider “what steps should be taken to reduce these risks and other ways to work together to ensure that the American people benefit from advances in Artificial Intelligence while protecting them from the risks.”

According to the White House, the four business leaders – Sam Altman for OpenAI, Dario Amodei for Anthropic, Satya Nadella for Microsoft and Sundar Pichai for Google – have confirmed their participation.

President Joe Biden made it “clear” last month that these companies “should ensure that their products are safe before making them available to the public,” the invitation said.

A White House official clarified that the administration would like to insist on the need to “innovate in a responsible, ethical and reliable manner.” Discussions are also held with various researchers, companies and non-governmental organizations to feed into the thinking being done on Artificial Intelligence.

This technology has been heavily involved in people’s daily lives for years, from social media recommendation algorithms to recruiting software and many high-tech home appliances.

But the success this winter of ChatGPT, a conversational AI application from OpenAI, a startup heavily funded by Microsoft, has sparked a race for ever-smarter and more capable systems, which are causing new sized excitement and worries.

Especially when Altman, the head of OpenAI, talks about the coming advent of so-called “general” Artificial Intelligence, when programs will be “smarter than people in general.”

Geoffrey Hinton, considered one of the founders of Artificial Intelligence, warned Monday of the “serious dangers to society and humanity” in an interview with The New York Times after resigning from his position at Google.

In terms of regulation, Europe hopes to lead the way again with a dedicated regulatory framework, as it did with the Personal Data Regulation.

The White House shared in late 2022 a “draft Bill of Rights on Artificial Intelligence,” a short text that lists general principles, such as protection from dangerous or potentially error-prone systems.