The White House has announced a new initiative to work with companies on artificial intelligence, rather than imposing restrictive regulations. The new Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence was announced on Thursday by the US government's deputy CTO and de facto head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP, Michael Kratsios. In prepared remarks, he said, "We didn't cut the lines before Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call; we didn't regulate flight before the Wright Brothers took off at Kitty Hawk." The announcement came as a surprise, given that the Trump White House has until this point been close-mouthed on the topic. In fact, Kratsios gave his speech on the same day that The Week published an article titled'Trump is MIA on AI'.