Vinod Khosla said the author of California’s recently vetoed AI bill, SB 1047, was clueless about the real dangers of AI, and not qualified to have an opinion on global national security issues. The comment about state Senator Scott Wiener was made during an onstage interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.

“He’s clueless about the real dangers, which are national security issues,” said Khosla, referring to Senator Wiener, who represents San Francisco in California’s legislature. “I’m a huge supporter of him when it comes to his efforts on housing and NIMBYism and stuff. So huge supporter on those issues because they are local issues. This is a global national security issue. He’s not qualified to have an opinion there.”

SB 1047 was a highly controversial AI bill that California’s legislature passed, but Governor Newsom vetoed in the face of opposition from Silicon Valley, Nancy Pelosi, and the United States Department of Commerce. The bill attempted to make AI laboratories liable for the most extreme dangers of their AI models, even if they were not the ones operating them in a dangerous way.

Senator Wiener tells TechCrunch that Khosla’s comments on Monday were “incredibly arrogant” for suggesting that “only AI technologists and mega investors have a right to an opinion” on AI’s societal impact.

“I appreciate Mr. Khosla’s support of my work on housing. For the record, I have no idea how to build a house, so I work with brilliant housing experts to craft smart housing policy,” said Wiener in an emailed statement to TechCrunch. “Similarly, in crafting and advancing SB 1047, I worked with some of the top AI experts on the planet, including Geoffrey Hinton, who pioneered machine learning and just won the Nobel Prize in Physics for doing so.”

Many in Silicon Valley, including Khosla, argued that SB 1047 would make technology companies hesitant to release cutting-edge AI models in California, therefore reducing America’s competitive edge in the AI race. Khosla wrote an opinion article in The Sacramento Bee in September arguing this bill could have a global impact on America’s national security, extending beyond the regulatory scope of a California state lawmaker.

Meanwhile, Wiener previously told TechCrunch that venture capitalists, including Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator, had run what he called a propaganda campaign against his bill. He argued that misinformation about the impact of SB 1047, and what the bill actually did, ran wild in recent months, and accused self-interested investors of spreading this misinformation to startup founders and the media.

Khosla went on to say he’d love to debate Wiener if he was here. Wiener is scheduled to speak on AI regulation at Disrupt on Wednesday, though the senator suggested Khosla should debate the AI researcher, Geoffrey Hinton, who supported SB 1047.