Raimondo on AI Safety: ‘Off to a Good Start’

A day before U.S. President Joe Biden and China President Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet in a highly anticipated meeting in San Francisco at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, I sat down in a small conference room off Market Street with one of Biden’s key deputies, who will be by his side in the meeting: Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo.

Most recently Raimondo has been busy building new relationships with the world’s largest tech companies, whose artificial intelligence ambitions now fall under the scrutiny of her department, per the president’s recent order on AI. As someone who has watched Silicon Valley behemoths like Google avoid working with the government for years, I asked her how that was going. 

“I am being extremely candid with you now,” she said. “This is what I have to figure out.”