Meta's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg, SpaceXAI's CEO Elon Musk and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, spoke to US Donald Trump in opposition to the establishment of an oversight body to regulate AI technology, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
The report cited sources in the know, regarding this move, with the proposal to establish such a body, coming from Google's Chief Scientist Demis Hassabis, who also heads the firm's DeepMind subsidiary.
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The monitoring committee would have been industry-funded in a similar fashion to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.
The three tech moguls' main point of contention as per the report was the possibility of this decision funneling more power to the US's most prominent AI labs, which include OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind.
Each of the three major tech CEOs held separate conversations with Trump regarding their concerns. The Trump administration subsequently refrained from developing the proposal for forming a supervisory board.
The report stated that officials within the US government informed major AI executives that creating an accord with regards to AI regulatory framework at the White House was proving to be difficult due to CEOs getting in touch with the President to object against such a move.
Zuckerberg had objected to such regulation in a recent post on social media platform 'X', arguing the companies themselves have the capabilities to do so.
"Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely, and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens," he stated.
Some company officials have voiced support for decelerating the pace of AI development and advocated working together to achieve consensus. Meta decided on its own to slow work on the Muse AI tool, rather than ask peers to also check their own progress first, Zuckerberg wrote.
Nvidia's Jensen Huang largely dismissed the idea that the AI industry had to slow down in order to address safety guardrails, arguing that it "could definitely have both at the same time", at a public interaction at Salesforce's Dreamforce event.
“We don't need new laws — we don't need new regulations," he said, as per reports.
SpacexAI's Elon Musk initially expressed skepticism and even ridiculed viral posts by former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon regarding AI's potential to destroy humanity. Musk seemed to exhibit a different opinion when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei posted an 800-word open letter and blog post warning against the dangers of unchecked AI development, where he said, "Dario is right."
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After stressing the need to evaluate AI concerns, OpenAI's Sam Altman also backed a federal framework for consistent safety requirements for frontier AI companies, saying the industry must ensure that safeguards keep pace with the rapid rise in AI capabilities.
Musk has not done so as of yet.
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