The White House has spoken on the influence of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One on Joe Biden’s concerns regarding artificial intelligence. 

The US President yesterday (October 31) signed an executive order to establish new standards and security measures surrounding AI – a move that Deputy White House chief of staff Bruce Reed said was partly informed by Biden’s “worry” after watching the latest Mission: Impossible film.

“If [Biden] hadn’t already been concerned about what could go wrong with AI before that movie, he saw plenty more to worry about,” Reed told the Associated Press. The Chief of Staff is said to have watched Dead Reckoning alongside the President at Camp David, following its release in July of this year.

The Tom Cruise-led film features a sentient AI villain known as the Entity. In various scenes, the AI is seen hijacking and sinking a Russian submarine, manipulating video footage of characters’ faces and impersonating human voices.

These features of artificial intelligence have previously been cited as concerns for Biden, who Reed said “was profoundly curious about the technology” of AI in the months leading up to yesterday’s executive order.

Reed said Biden had witnessed AI technology create “fake AI images of himself [and] of his dog”, and had seen it perform “the incredible and terrifying technology of voice cloning”. He continued: “[AI] can take three seconds of your voice and turn it into an entire fake conversation.”

The action items of Biden’s executive order will be carried out in the next 90 to 365 days, as part of what the White House described as “the most sweeping actions ever taken to protect Americans from the potential risks of AI systems”.

The items relating to AI safety and security will be addressed first, and include the development of tools and safety tests surrounding AI and the use of watermarking to clearly label AI-generated content.

“The AI baddie is sillier than Elon Musk’s Twitter strategy,” NME wrote of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One in a three-star review. “As ChatGPT dominates the internet and we all wait anxiously for robots to make us redundant, the film’s setup seems like a masterstroke. But it’s sadly also its downfall.”