President Obama calls for public oversight of AI, warns of disruption ahead

When Oyungoo Enkhbold recently got the chance to speak with President Obama, she didn't hold back.

"AI is already being used in wars, government surveillance programs, and to spread fake news at scale, yet it also drives real economic and social progress." said Enkhbold. 

She asked President Obama how democratic leaders can harness AI’s benefits while making sure it’s not used against their own citizens.

President Obama's answer was direct.

"It is going to be a very disruptive technology," he said, "more so even than social media."

President Obama described AI as a genuine technological revolution, one that will transform medicine, energy, economic production, and education, often invisibly at first, then rapidly. He pointed to radiology as an example: AI's pattern-recognition capabilities may soon outpace some trained specialists. This disruption is already hitting coding work, as Silicon Valley is seeing jobs being replaced by AI.

He also pointed to the promise of the tool: faster cancer research, smarter energy grids, and, possibly, AI-powered tutors capable of giving a child in a remote village personalized instruction. None of it, he said, happens responsibly without guardrails and benchmarks for public safety.

“AI is very expensive to develop, and it’s controlled by private companies. In the past, these kinds of big revolutions typically had government involvement in subsidizing them in helping them get started, including the internet,” he said. “This is why I think it’s going to be important here in the United States as a starting point, but also in other places, to have some public regulatory structure that helps to steer where this technology goes so that it doesn’t just benefit a few wealthy corporations, but benefits people more broadly — both to prevent the bad results that we could see from AI, like misinformation, deep fakes, etc. but also to encourage them to go in a better direction to pursue the things that we really need.”

For Enkhbold, President Obama's answer reframed how she thinks back to her initial question.

"His answer clarified something I had been thinking about for months. He pointed to the urgent gap in collective international guidance on AI. I agree," she said. "It told me the work is still open. There's still space to shape it.”

Enkhbold built a free online learning platform called AI Academia Asia to teach people across Mongolia and Central Asia about AI at their own pace, and helped design a national campaign that has already trained around 500 educators.

She’s seen firsthand how artificial intelligence can open doors for hundreds of young women in science, technology, engineering, and math, but she’s also seen how the spread of misinformation and unregulated surveillance threatens these same women. 

“Across Asia, there are communities at exactly the same early stage of building their AI ecosystems, asking the same questions, and facing the same gaps in literacy, governance, and trust,” Enkhbold said. “That's where I want to contribute next with the help of Obama Foundation Leaders."

"I want to help build something that outlasts me," Enkhbold continued. “An international program. A framework. Something that keeps teaching even when I'm not in the room." The questions she's asking now don't stop at any one border. "This isn't a challenge any single government can solve alone," she said. "It requires shared standards and shared responsibility, built everywhere, at once."

A week later, during a separate roundtable with Obama Foundation Europe Leaders, Jenny Romano, a 2025-2026 Obama Europe Leader , also asked President Obama about the responsible use of AI. 

"I work on AI to protect the integrity of information online,” Romano said of her work in Portugal. “The real challenge is getting people to believe in a different vision of technology and AI and what they could be, and right now they don't really have a great reputation."

President Obama challenged leaders like Romano to think of ways to guide the technology in a values-based way.

"I have not yet seen the kind of effective regulatory framework that we need to do that," he said. 

He called on leaders working in and around AI to connect across borders around a short, clear list of public-facing issues: job displacement, safeguards for AI agents, and watermarking tools that can distinguish real content from fabricated content.

“To me, the most important thing we can do right now around AI is to educate the public that already has a sense that this is potentially going to displace their job; they already have a sense that this may make some of the problems with social media worse; they already have a sense that this may affect the way their children learn. So they already have an interest, but nobody’s structuring the conversation in a trustworthy way.”

Romano left the call with her own list of issues she believes leaders must rally the public around: human agency in the age of AI, ownership and control, and who manages the technology and what that means for society. Romano sees AI as two problems collapsing into one.

"Information is what gives us agency, and agency is what makes us human," she said. "Right now we're losing it on two fronts simultaneously — we don't trust the information we rely on to make decisions, and we're delegating more and more of those decisions to AI systems we can't trace or hold accountable.”

Romano worked for five years building AI tools to help journalists to trace, analyze, and establish the origin of information online, and educating the industry on responsible AI use, as the co-founder and CEO of The Newsroom, a Portugal-based technology company. The company works with partners including the BBC and Stanford's Starling Lab on information provenance, rebuilding the scaffolding of trust in information at scale. It starts with journalism, but the foundation is wider: a human-attested information infrastructure that makes it possible to verify what was said, by whom, and when.

As a Europe Leader while reflecting on her cohort, she said, "I walked in expecting people with answers. What I found was a room full of remarkable humans, all sitting with uncertainty and figuring it out.” 

Two things that President Obama said have stayed with Romano: that making AI legible is as important as any policy lever, and that "we lose a lot of potential support by sounding like we're talking down to people." 

His insights have helped shape what she's building next: an initiative called Locanda AI, after the Italian inns where travellers, traders and strangers historically ended up at the same table. Anyone can pull up a chair and ask what we actually want AI to do, not just what it's capable of. "The bridge between fear and action is never the argument," she said. "It's whether people feel spoken to or spoken at." 

“Let’s say over the next five to 10 years, we’re going to see more changes in the economy than I think the public fully understands,” said President Obama, “and so that’s an opportunity to get ahead of public vague concerns, and try to give them the tools they need to ask the right questions of the people in power and hold them accountable.”