The U.S. government must move "quickly and decisively" to avert substantial national security risks stemming from artificial intelligence (AI) which could, in the worst case, cause an "extinction-level threat to the human species," says a report commissioned by the U.S. government published on Monday. "Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security," the report, which TIME obtained ahead of its publication, says. "The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons." AGI is a hypothetical technology that could perform most tasks at or above the level of a human. Such systems do not currently exist, but the leading AI labs are working toward them and many expect AGI to arrive within the next five years or less.

Center for A.I. Safety Director Dan Hendrycks explains concerns about how the rapid growth of artificial intelligence could impact society. People need to change how they're thinking about regulating artificial intelligence, according to a prominent expert in the field, who pushed back on an idea gaining traction among lawmakers to create a new government agency to regulate AI. "Regulation is a really hard question," Andres Sawicki, a professor of law and director of the business of innovation, law, and technology (BILT) concentration at the University of Miami, told Fox News Digital. "The topic of AI is too big to be handled in one big coherent manner." Rather than tackling AI in a sweeping, comprehensive way, Sawicki recommend a more pragmatic, piecemeal approach. "Look specifically and concretely at effects the technology is having, the impact of AI on this or that issue. There shouldn't be a Department of AI to handle this in one big swoop."

The U.S. has so far been relatively permissive toward AI technologies--and we should keep it that way. It's the reason so much innovation happens here rather than in the more prohibitory European nations. The main reason the government hasn't hampered the industry with regulation is that there's no overbearing federal agency dedicated strictly to AI. Instead, we have a patchwork of federal and state authorities scrutinizing these technologies. The Federal Trade Commission and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, for example, recently hosted a workshop to determine how to oversee automated-car technologies.