Pentagon: Product Liability, Executive Power Are Sufficient AI Regulation

On Monday’s broadcast of Newsmax TV’s “Carl Higbie Frontline,” Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering and Department of War Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael said that we have sufficient AI regulations due to product liability rules and tools that the executive branch has.

Michael said, “With any new product that’s launching that has this much significance, you don’t know all of its downsides and upsides at the beginning. Like, take driverless cars, people are afraid of driverless cars. They were afraid of Ubers when I was running Uber, Ubers are not as safe as taxis. And now we’re saying a robotaxi is as safe as Ubers. There’s this fear. And I think what one side of the equation is doing now is trying to put, really, a psychological operation to overscare people about risks. Because, remember, these companies are liable for the harm their products do. We have a huge set of regulations and laws that, if they hack into an energy system and take power out, not for the grid, just for one neighborhood, they’re going to be liable for that. And when they come to the government and look for help, I think what they’re trying to do is lay off the liability on the taxpayer, and we’re not falling for that.”

He added that anything that’s put into the Pentagon’s system is strongly tested.

Michael further stated, in response to a question on an AI model breaking its parameters, “We’ve had computer viruses before. We’ve had other things that weren’t well-designed before they were let out in the wild. In that particular case, it was a testing environment and it did some damage and they recovered from it and I’m sure they’ll learn their lessons from that. But I think what people are missing is, you can go from a product that needs to be tested — even the FDA, we do medical trials, and if it doesn’t — the results don’t come out right, you don’t let the drug out. So, I think you have to assume that there’s going to be some experimentation with these things. Are they going to kill us tomorrow, which is the vibe we got over the weekend from a foreigner who was part of sort of an ideological community who said, we’re all going to be extinct in three years? I think what you’re talking about is a real kind of hoaxy sort of fear factor that is playing into the November elections.”

He concluded, “I think the best thing to turn us into Europe would be to regulate something from Congress on a fast-moving technology, as opposed to putting the responsibility where it lies, on the companies developing these products. These are products. Think of them as products. They could be cars. Remember the Pinto that had a bad gas tank, and they got punished for that. These companies have to understand their liability, not lay it off on the taxpayer. And we have sufficient regulations, the president said so today. There are civil penalties. There are criminal penalties for your product doing harm. And I think that incentive, plus, remember this: The president shut down Anthropic in a few hours with export controls when he found that they weren’t calculating their risk appropriately. So, we have the tools, the president has the tools to act immediately if there’s ever a danger to Americans.”

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