The heads of the companies behind the current artificial intelligence boom visited the White House to discuss AI.

The meeting, which drew the CEOs of Google and Microsoft, as well as the heads of OpenAI and Anthropic, was mostly held behind closed doors.

Vice President Kamala Harris led the meeting, but President Joe Biden briefly dropped in. “What you’re doing has enormous potential and enormous danger,” Biden told the CEOs, in a publicly posted video.

Harris echoed the comments in a statement after the meeting, saying that AI has the "potential to improve people’s lives and tackle some of society’s biggest challenges.”

She added: “At the same time, AI has the potential to dramatically increase threats to safety and security, infringe civil rights and privacy, and erode public trust and faith in democracy.”

The four companies are leaders in a new wave of generative AI, including large language models and text-to-image models. OpenAI is backed by Microsoft, while Anthropic (formed by ex OpenAI employees) is backed by Google.

Regulators around the world are currently struggling with how to regulate the new models, and understand what they mean for humanity.

This week the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced a review of AI foundation models to 'examine the competitive market, opportunities and risks, and produce guiding principles to support competition and protect consumers.'