Key events
Trump to meet with China’s Xi as Congress mulls bill banning artificial superintelligence
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Donald Trump will meet with the Chinese president Xi Jinping later today, ahead of a three-day visit that will undoubtedly see artificial intelligence (AI) high on the agenda.
António Guterres, the UN secretary general, has called on the two countries to establish a dialogue on AI similar to the communication between the US and the Soviet Union during the cold war.
“Governments with the greatest AI capabilities have the greatest responsibilities to humanity, to establish channels for dialogue, transparency, trust and cooperation,” Guterres said.
Tech executives including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Sundar Pichai of Alphabet, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Tim Cook of Apple, Elon Musk of Tesla, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta and Jensen Huang of Nvidia will reportedly attend a state dinner at the White House on Thursday evening.
It comes as two leading progressive US lawmakers, senator Bernie Sanders and representative Greg Casar, were due to unveil legislation later today that would ban artificial superintelligence and create a federal agency to oversee advanced AI.
The bill, provided first to the Associated Press, would also pause advanced AI development until guidelines are implemented while creating the Department of Artificial Intelligence. Multiple employees at leading AI companies are endorsing the bill.
“It doesn’t take a genius to say, ‘slow it down,’” Sanders said in an interview with AP. “Do we really want to develop a super intelligence that when it becomes smarter than human beings could act independently of human control? I don’t think we do.”
Congress has so far done little to rein in the AI industry even as some of its most prominent leaders warn about potentially catastrophic risks.
Xi departed Beijing on Wednesday, state media said, heading to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, where he will be met by Trump on the tarmac.
“President Xi Jinping left Beijing by special plane for a state visit to the United States” accompanied by his wife Peng Liyuan, his right-hand man Cai Qi, and foreign minister Wang Yi, among others, state broadcaster CCTV said.
In other developments:
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Speaking at the UN general assembly, Donald Trump re-issued his threat to “annihilate” Iran and “drive them into Hell” if the regime didn’t capitulate and make a deal.” He also said he was “working closely with the leaders of Russia and Ukraine” to end the disastrous war, defended his administration’s actions in Latin America – including the midnight raid to arrest former Venezuelan president Nicólas Maduro, defended his drone strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific, accused Mexico of being effectively controlled by the cartels, and said it was “unacceptable” for the US to share a border with a nation under such conditions, pointed to regime change in Cuba and said he would reject any calls for a “globalist scheme” to control artificial intelligence.
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Shortly after his UN address, Trump signed a Greenland deal, which Greenland’s prime minister Jens-Frederick Nielsen said “underlines the importance of the Nato alliance.” In tricky, carefully worded paragraphs, she said the agreement “recognises the US defining historical and ongoing contributions to the security and defence of Greenland,” but it also “respects the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Denmark, as well as Greenland’s right to self-determination.”
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Trump told a CNN reporter at the UN general assembly on Tuesday that he was “surprised” the outlet was covering him, saying it ‘shouldn’t be here’ after he banned the network alongside Politico and MS Now from the White House on Friday.
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At a joint press conference on Tuesday, vice-president JD Vance and Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, announced that the federal government was removing ۷۶۰,۰۰۰ enrollees from Affordable Care Act insurance marketplaces.
