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Elon Musk and Palantir co-founder & CEO Alex Karp attend a bipartisan Artificial Intelligence (AI) Insight Forum for all U.S. senators hosted by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., September 13, 2023. 

Leah Millis | Reuters

Tech CEOs descended on Capitol Hill Wednesday to speak with senators about artificial intelligence as lawmakers consider how to craft guardrails for the powerful technology.

It was a meeting that “may go down in history as being very important for the future of civilization,” billionaire tech executive Elon Musk told CNBC’s Eamon Javers and other reporters as he left the meeting.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., hosted the panel of tech executives, labor and civil rights leaders as part of the Senate’s inaugural “AI Insight Forum.” Sens. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., and Todd Young, R-Ind., helped organize the event and have worked with Schumer on other sessions educating lawmakers on AI.

Top tech executives in attendance Wednesday included:

  • OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
  • Former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates
  • Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
  • Palantir CEO Alex Karp
  • IBM CEO Arvind Krishna
  • Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk
  • Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella
  • Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai
  • Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt
  • Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg

The panel, attended by more than 60 senators, according to Schumer, took place behind closed doors. Schumer said the closed forum allowed for an open discussion among the attendees, without the normal time and format restrictions of a public hearing. But Schumer said some future forums would be open to public view.

Top U.S. technology leaders including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates take their seats for the start of a bipartisan Artificial Intelligence (AI) Insight Forum for all U.S. senators hosted by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S., September 13, 2023. 

Leah Millis | Reuters

The panel also featured several other stakeholders representing labor, civil rights and the creative industry. Among those were leaders like:

  • Motion Picture Association Chairman and CEO Charles Rivkin
  • AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler
  • Writers Guild President Meredith Steihm
  • American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten
  • Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights President and CEO Maya Wiley

After the morning session, the AFL-CIO’s Shuler told reporters that the meeting was a unique chance to bring together a wide range of voices.

In response to a question about getting to speak with Musk, Shuler said, “I think it was just an opportunity to be in each other’s space, but we don’t often cross paths and so to bring a worker’s voice and perspective into the room with tech executives, with advocates, with lawmakers is a really unusual place to be.”

“It was a very civilized discussion actually among some of the smartest people in the world,” Musk told reporters on his way out. “Sen. Schumer did a great service to humanity here along with the support of the rest of the Senate. And I think something good will come of this.”

Google’s Pichai outlined four areas where Congress could play an important role in AI development, according to his prepared remarks. First by crafting policies that support innovation, including through research and development investment or immigration laws that incentivize talented workers to come to the U.S. Second, “by driving greater use of AI in government,” third by applying AI to big problems like detecting cancer, and finally by “advancing a workforce transition agenda that benefits everyone.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai, arrives for a US Senate bipartisan Artificial Intelligence (AI) Insight Forum at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on September 13, 2023.

Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images

Meta’s Zuckerberg said he sees safety and access as the “two defining issues for AI,” according to his prepared remarks. He said Meta is being “deliberate about how we roll out these products,” by openly publishing research, partnering with academics and setting policies for how its AI models can be used.

He touted Meta’s open-source AI work as a way to ensure broad access to the technology. Still, he said, “we’re not zealots about this. We don’t open source everything. We think closed models are good too, but we also think a more open approach creates more value in many cases.”

Working toward legislation

Schumer said in his prepared remarks that the event marked the beginning of “an enormous and complex and vital undertaking: building a foundation for bipartisan AI policy that Congress can pass.”

There’s broad interest in Washington in creating guardrails for AI, but so far many lawmakers have said they want to learn more about the technology before figuring out the appropriate restrictions.

But Schumer told reporters after the morning session that legislation should come in a matter of months, not years.

“If you go too fast, you could ruin things,” Schumer said. “The EU went too fast, and now they have to go back. So what we’re saying is, on a timeline, it can’t be days or weeks, but nor should it be years. It will be in the general category of months.”

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) addresses a press conference during a break in a bipartisan Artificial Intelligence (AI) Insight Forum for all U.S. senators at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, September 13, 2023.

Julia Nikhinson | Reuters

Schumer said he expects the actual legislation to come through the committees. This session provides the necessary foundation for them to do this work, he said. Successful legislation will need to be bipartisan, Schumer added, saying he’d spoken with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who was “encouraging.”

Schumer said he’d asked everyone in the room Wednesday if they believe government needs to play a role in regulating AI, and everyone raised their hand.

The broad group that attended the morning session did not get into detail about whether a licensing regime or some other model would be most appropriate, Schumer said, adding that it would be discussed further in the afternoon session. Still, he said, they heard a variety of opinions on whether a “light touch” was the right approach to regulation and whether a new or existing agency should oversee AI.

Young said those in the room agreed that U.S. values should inform the development of AI, rather than those of the Chinese Communist Party.

While Schumer has led this effort for a broad legislative framework, he said his colleagues need not wait to craft bills for their ideas about AI regulation. But putting together sensible legislation that can also pass will take time.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who leads the Commerce Committee, predicted lawmakers could get AI legislation “done in the next year.” She referenced the Chips and Science Act, a bipartisan law that set aside funding for semiconductor manufacturing, as an example of being able to pass important technology legislation fairly quickly.

“This is the hardest thing that I think we have ever undertaken,” Schumer told reporters. “But we can’t be like ostriches and put our head in the sand. Because if we don’t step forward, things will be a lot worse.”

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Elon Musk’s X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

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Elon Musk's X temporarily down for tens of thousands of users

Elon Musk looks on as U.S. President Donald Trump meets South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 21, 2025.

Kevin Lamarque | Reuters

The Elon Musk-owned social media platform X experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, with tens of thousands of users reportedly unable to use the site.

About 25,000 users reported issues with the platform, according to the analytics platform Downdetector, which gathers data from users to monitor issues with various platforms.

Roughly 21,000 users reported issues just after 8:30 a.m. ET, per the analytics platform.

The issues appeared to be largely resolved by around 9:55 a.m., when about 2,000 users were reporting issues with the platform.

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X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Additional information on the outage was not available.

Musk, the billionaire owner of SpaceX and Tesla, acquired X, formerly known as Twitter in 2022.

The site has had a number of widespread outages since the acquisition.

The site experienced another outage in March, which Musk attributed at the time to a “massive cyberattack.”

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk wrote in a post at the time.

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

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Companies turn to AI to navigate Trump tariff turbulence

Artificial intelligence robot looking at futuristic digital data display.

Yuichiro Chino | Moment | Getty Images

Businesses are turning to artificial intelligence tools to help them navigate real-world turbulence in global trade.

Several tech firms told CNBC say they’re deploying the nascent technology to visualize businesses’ global supply chains — from the materials that are used to form products, to where those goods are being shipped from — and understand how they’re affected by U.S. President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs.

Last week, Salesforce said it had developed a new import specialist AI agent that can “instantly process changes for all 20,000 product categories in the U.S. customs system and then take action on them” as needed, to help navigate changes to tariff systems.

Engineers at the U.S. software giant used the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, a 4,400-page document of tariffs on goods imported to the U.S., to inform answers generated by the agent.

“The sheer pace and complexity of global tariff changes make it nearly impossible for most businesses to keep up manually,” Eric Loeb, executive vice president of government affairs at Salesforce, told CNBC. “In the past, companies might have relied on small teams of in-house experts to keep pace.”

Firms say that AI systems are enabling them to take decisions on adjustments to their global supply chains much faster.

Andrew Bell, chief product officer of supply chain management software firm Kinaxis, said that manufacturers and distributors looking to inform their response to tariffs are using his firm’s machine learning technology to assess their products and the materials that go into them, as well as external signals like news articles and macroeconomic data.

“With that information, we can start doing some of those simulations of, here is a particular part that is in your build material that has a significant tariff. If you switched to using this other part instead, what would the impact be overall?” Bell told CNBC.

‘AI’s moment to shine’

Trump’s tariffs list — which covers dozens of countries — has forced companies to rethink their supply chains and pricing, with the likes of Walmart and Nike already raising prices on some products. The U.S. imported about $3.3 trillion of goods in 2024, according to census data.

Uncertainty from the U.S. tariff measures “actually probably presents AI’s moment to shine,” Zack Kass, a futurist and former head of OpenAI’s go-to-market strategy, told CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy last month.

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“If you wonder how hard things could get without AI vis-a-vis automation, and what would happen in a world where you can’t just employ a bunch of people overnight, AI presents this alternative proposal,” he added.

Nagendra Bandaru, managing partner and global head of technology services at Indian IT giant Wipro, said clients are using the company’s agentic AI solutions “to pivot supplier strategies, adjust trade lanes, and manage duty exposure dynamically as policy landscapes evolve.”

Wipro says it uses a range of AI systems — both proprietary and supplied by third parties — from large language models to traditional machine learning and computer vision techniques to inspect physical assets in cross-border transit.

‘Not a silver bullet’

While it preferred to keep company names confidential, Wipro said that firms using its AI products to navigate Trump’s tariffs range from a Fortune 500 electronics manufacturer with factories in Asia to an automotive parts supplier exporting to Europe and North America.

“AI is a powerful enabler — but not a silver bullet,” Bandaru told CNBC. “It doesn’t replace trade policy strategy, it enhances it by transforming global trade from a reactive challenge into a proactive, data-driven advantage.”

AI was already a key investment priority for global firms prior to Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements on April. Nearly three-quarters of business leaders ranked AI and generative AI in their top three technologies for investment in 2025, according to a report by Capgemini published in January.

“There are a number of ways AI can assist companies dealing with the tariffs and resulting uncertainty.  But any AI solution’s success will be predicated on the quality of the data it has access to,” Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, told CNBC.

The venture capitalist said that one of his portfolio companies, FourKites, uses supply chain network data with AI to help firms understand the logistics impacts of adjusting suppliers due to tariffs.

“They are working with a number of Fortune 500 companies to leverage their agents for freight and ocean to provide this level of visibility and intelligence,” Agarwal said.

“Switching suppliers may reduce tariffs costs, but might increase lead times and transportation costs,” he added. “In addition, the volatility of the tariffs [has] severely impacted the rates and capacity available in both the ocean and the domestic freight networks.”

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Amazon’s Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

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Amazon's Zoox robotaxi unit issues second software recall in a month after San Francisco crash

A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Amazon‘s Zoox robotaxi unit issued a voluntary recall of its software for the second time in a month following a recent crash in San Francisco.

On May 8, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi was turning at low speed when it was struck by an electric scooter rider after braking to yield at an intersection. The person on the scooter declined medical attention after sustaining minor injuries as a result of the collision, Zoox said.

“The Zoox vehicle was stopped at the time of contact,” the company said in a blog post. “The e-scooterist fell to the ground directly next to the vehicle. The robotaxi then began to move and stopped after completing the turn, but did not make further contact with the e-scooterist.”

Zoox said it submitted a voluntary software recall report to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Thursday.

A Zoox spokesperson said the notice should be published on the NHTSA website early next week. The recall affected 270 vehicles, the spokesperson said.

The NHTSA said in a statement it had received the recall notice and that the agency “advises road users to be cautious in the vicinity of vehicles because drivers may incorrectly predict the travel path of a cyclist or scooter rider or come to an unexpected stop.”

If an autonomous vehicle continues to move after contact with any nearby vulnerable road user, it risks causing harm or further harm. In the AV industry, General Motors-backed Cruise exited the robotaxi business after a collision in which one of its vehicles injured a pedestrian who had been struck by a human-driven car and was then rolled over by the Cruise AV.

Zoox’s May incident comes roughly two weeks after the company announced a separate voluntary software recall following a recent Las Vegas crash. In that incident, an unoccupied Zoox robotaxi collided with a passenger vehicle, resulting in minor damage to both vehicles.

The company issued a software recall for 270 of its robotaxis in order to address a defect with its automated driving system that could cause it to inaccurately predict the movement of another car, increasing the “risk of a crash.”

Amazon acquired Zoox in 2020 for more than $1 billion, announcing at the time that the deal would help bring the self-driving technology company’s “vision for autonomous ride-hailing to reality.”

While Zoox is in a testing and development stage with its AVs on public roads in the U.S., Alphabet’s Waymo is already operating commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, and is ramping up in Atlanta.

Tesla is promising it will launch its long-delayed robotaxis in Austin next month, and, if all goes well, plans to expand after that to San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Antonio, Texas.

— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.

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