Yet DeSantis and Uthmeier are still charging hard. Uthmeier sued OpenAI and Altman in June, a landmark legal challenge, claiming the company is failing to protect users from potential harms. OpenAI is fighting Florida’s lawsuit and defends its user protection policies. Uthmeier has also sued the streaming giant Netflix and TikTok.
Uthmeier, who is up for election in November, said this month he wants Florida lawmakers to pass legislation allowing his office to criminally charge companies for illegal acts carried out with the use of their chatbots, such as creating child sexual abuse materials. The change would allow Florida to treat tech companies “like a co-defendant in a homicide,” Uthmeier said.
One of three state attorneys general endorsed by Trump, Uthmeier, agreed with the White House that “we have to beat China” on AI advancement or “we are toast.” He said he’d prefer that Congress pass AI safety legislation.
“But in the absence of that,” he continued, “we can’t just stand around and watch our kids be advised on how to commit suicide and hurt themselves. We can’t stand by and watch ChatGPT advise two school murderers,” referencing recent killings at state universities alleged to have been aided by chatbots.
New York’s AI safety law, which was modeled on California’s, does not take effect until January. But Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul said this week she already was looking to find “additional actions that we can take at the state level to lead the way in the absence of leadership from Washington.” She did not specify what that might look like.
“I believe we have an obligation to ensure that technological progress does not come at our own peril,” Hochul said after a Tuesday event in New York City.
The flurry around AI safety builds on a national debate over data centers, which power the technology. Amid fears of AI risks, pollution and electricity costs, intense blowback to data center construction has factored into numerous high-profile U.S. Senate, congressional and gubernatorial campaigns ahead of the midterms. The debate also has no clear partisan lines with Democrats and Republicans hammering each other over supposed support for data centers.
Once again, though, the president’s stance is explicit. He called Jensen Huang, chief executive of AI-chip company Nvidia, while Huang was on stage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles Monday afternoon to extol the benefits of data centers and ridicule naysayers.
“The data centers are great, and they make people wealthy, and they make states wealthy, and it’s the oil for the next 20-25 years, bigger than the internet. And AI, much more so,” the president said.
Jalen Beckford contributed to this report.