OpenAI Chief Sam Altman Wants an FDA-Style Agency for Artificial Intelligence

The creation of a new Artificial Intelligence Regulatory Agency was widely endorsed today during a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law hearing on Oversight of A.I.: Rule for Artificial Intelligence. Senators and witnesses cited the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) as models for how the new A.I. agency might operate. This is a terrible idea.

The witnesses at the hearing were OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, IBM Chief Privacy & Trust Officer Christina Montgomery, and A.I. researcher-turned-critic Gary Marcus. In response to one senator’s suggestion that the NRC might serve as a model for A.I. regulation, Altman naively agreed that the “NRC is a great analogy” for the type of A.I. regulation he favors. Marcus argued that A.I. should be licensed in much the same way that the FDA approves new drugs. Those are great models if your goal is to stymie progress or kill off new technologies.

The NRC has basically regulated the nuclear power industry to near death, and it takes 12 to 15 years for a new drug to get from the lab bench to a patient’s bedside, thanks to the FDA. Unintended consequences of NRC overregulation include more deaths from pollution and accidents and the greater emission of greenhouse gases than might otherwise have been the case. Delayed drug approvals by the FDA result in higher mortality than speedily approving drugs that later ne