Biden stated that technology businesses have a duty to make sure their goods are secure before being released in his opening remarks at a meeting with advisers in the fields of science and technology on Tuesday.

At the beginning of a meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, Vice President Joe Biden remarked, “Tech companies have a responsibility, in my view, to make sure their products are safe before they are made public.”

Biden said that it “remains to be seen” but that “it could be” when asked if AI was hazardous.

Although Biden acknowledged that AI might contribute in the fight against diseases and climate change, he also noted that “potential risks to our society, to our economy, and to our national security” must be taken into consideration.

The president claimed that social media’s effects on young people’s mental health demonstrated the damage that new technologies may cause if safety measures are not put in place.

Biden’s comments come as the argument over how to govern AI is heating up, with some well-known voices advocating for a halt to the technology’s advancement until safety measures can be put in place.

Elon Musk, the inventor of Tesla, and Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, among others, urged for a halt on the adoption of AI in an open letter that was released last month owing to the “profound risks to society and humanity.”

The latter was in response to GPT-4, the successor to the ground-breaking AI chatbot ChatGPT, being released.

The newer platform, according to GPT-4’s California-based developer OpenAI, is capable of “human-level performance” in specific situations, such as passing the bar exam with a score in the top 10 percent of candidates.

Italy was the first Western nation to outlaw ChatGPT last week after its data protection agency said that there appeared to be “no legal basis” for the program’s extensive data collecting.