The Senate is scheduled this week to hear from the leading voices in Silicon Valley on the pertinence and power of artificial intelligence and on recommendations for regulating the technology.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is scheduled to host the first of nine “AI Insight Forums” on Wednesday, an unusual event that reflects the priority that Schumer is placing on addressing AI. The event will feature nearly two dozen CEOs and executives appearing before the Senate to offer their perspectives on what sort of rules are needed to make AI safe. It will be the first of nine forums scheduled this fall that will cover many areas where the technology is likely to prove helpful — or disruptive.
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The forums will be “unlike any other that we have seen in the Senate in a very long time, perhaps ever: a coming together of top voices in business, civil rights, defense, research, labor, the arts, all together, in one room, having a much-needed conversation about how Congress can tackle AI,” Schumer said in floor remarks last week.
The Forums
Schumer announced his plans for insight forums in June alongside his five-point framework for legislation. He also hosted three senator-only briefings this summer on the technology.
The roster of attendees includes OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, X CEO Elon Musk, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. A few labor leaders and civil rights advocates will also be at the event, including AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and AI accountability researcher Deb Raji.
At least one event attendee is preparing to present recommendations. “We’re reviewing recent regulatory proposals to get a sense of Hill priorities,” Hugging Face Policy Director Irene Solaiman told the MIT Technology Review. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue is one of the 22 leaders scheduled to attend. The company intends to encourage Congress to provide more funding for research, such as that done by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and to ensure that open-source AI work is protected.
The event will begin Wednesday morning and extend throughout the day, according to notes reviewed by Axios. Attendees cannot question or argue with the speakers.
Where Congress stands on AI
Republicans and Democrats have both stated the importance of passing legislation to establish guidelines for AI development.
Some tech industry leaders, such as Altman and Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), have pushed for the creation of an independent federal agency to create licenses and set the rules for AI.
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Other industry representatives, such as Google President of Global Affairs Kent Walker, argue that the tools required to regulate AI should not be centered in a singular agency. Instead, they should have standards set by a federal office like the National Institute of Standards and Technology, allowing federal agencies to make the appropriate rulemaking decisions.
Schumer and Beyer, the leading House Democrat on the technology, are confident that some AI legislation could be passed by the year’s end. However, what that legislation entails is to be determined. Congress has introduced several bills for consideration, from task forces dedicated to understanding the technology to barring AI from access to nuclear weapons.
