With Executive Order, White House Tries to Balance A.I.’s Potential and Peril

How do you regulate something that has the potential to both help and harm people, that touches every sector of the economy and that is changing so quickly even the experts can’t keep up?

That has been the main challenge for governments when it comes to artificial intelligence.

Regulate A.I. too slowly and you might miss out on the chance to prevent potential hazards and dangerous misuses of the technology.

React too quickly and you risk writing bad or harmful rules, stifling innovation or ending up in a position like the European Union’s. It first released its A.I. Act in 2021, just before a wave of new generative A.I. tools arrived, rendering much of the act obsolete. (The proposal, which has not yet been made law, was subsequently rewritten to shoehorn in some of the new tech, but it’s still a bit awkward.)

On Monday, the White House announced its own attempt to govern the fast-moving world of A.I. with a sweeping executive order that imposes new rules on companies and directs a host of federal agencies to begin putting guardrails around the technology.