Money and politics continue to merge in AI safety — including a new Super PAC
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Welcome to another edition of ?? The AI Beat ??!
Back in January, I spoke to Mark Beall, a co-founder and CEO of Gladstone AI , a consulting firm that released a bombshell report yesterday, commissioned by the State Department. The announcement was first covered by TIME , which highlighted the report ‘s AI safety action-plan recommendations — that is, “how the US should respond to what it argues are significant national security risks posed by advanced AI.”
When I first spoke to Beall, we chatted for a story I was writing about the debate among AI and policy leaders about a “web” of effective altruism adherents in AI security circles in Washington, DC. There was no doubt that Beall, who told me he was a former head of AI policy at the U.S. Department of Defense, felt strongly about the need to manage the potential catastrophic threats of AI. In a post on X that shared my story, Beall wrote that “common sense safeguards are needed urgently before we get an AI 9/11.”
For many, the term “AI safety” is synonymous with tackling the “existential ” risks of AI — some may be drawn to those concerns through belief systems such as effective altruism (EA), or, as the report maintained, from working in ‘frontier’ AI labs like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Meta. The Gladstone AI authors of the report said they spoke with more than 200 government employees, experts, and workers at frontier AI companies as part of their year-long research.
As the debate swirled on X, I was particularly interested to read in the TIME piece that Beall, who was one of three co-authors of the Gladstone AI report (which was commissioned for $250,000), had recently left the firm to run what he told me in a message is “to our knowledge, the first AI safety Super PAC.” The PAC, he said, which launched yesterday — the same day as the Gladstone report came out — plans “to run a national voter education campaign on AI policy. The public will be directly impacted by this issue. We want to help them be as informed as possible.”
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