Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y. Schumer launched a sprawling congressional effort to set new rules for artificial intelligence. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., on Wednesday launched a sprawling congressional effort to set new rules for artificial intelligence, touting a plan to more closely entwine lawmakers with outside experts in a race to catch up to Europe’s lengthy head start on a robust regulatory package.
Schumer unveiled what he called a “new process” for fielding input from industry representatives, researchers and consumer advocates, a system designed to turbocharge lawmakers’ understanding of the complicated area and speed regulation along. In expansive remarks Wednesday, he urged officials to move cautiously to avoid hindering U.S. innovation while deputizing key lawmakers across the chamber to hammer out bipartisan proposals to head off concerns about the technology’s impact on privacy, intellectual property and national security.
The high-profile speech is expected to kick off a wave of legislative activity on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers face mounting pressure from advocates and AI ethicists to set new protections to prevent AI from being abused, but where the pace of negotiations massively trails behind the European Union, which last week advanced a sweeping AI bill after years of discussions.
The White House and a slew of federal agencies have in recent months launched their own initiatives to keep AI tools in check and consider new guardrails for their use, but Schumer’s push marks the broadest congressional effort yet.
“Congress must join the AI revolution,” Schumer said at an event hosted by a D.C.-based think tank, asking lawmakers to act with both urgency and “humility” in tackling the technology.
Schumer’s push represents one of the most significant efforts to craft new tech regulations led by leadership on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have struggled for years to advance rules on data privacy, competition and other major legislative areas. His status as the highest-ranking Democratic lawmaker in Washington lends the effort added heft and could help lawmakers overcome political hurdles that have bogged down previous talks.
Still, the speech was light on details about what specific AI-focused laws could look like. Schumer said in an interview afterward that it would take “months” but not “years” for a legislative package to be presented to Congress.
As part of the effort, Schumer said he has called on the Senate’s Democratic committee leaders, including the chairs of key panels with oversight over commerce, homeland security and competition, to cooperate with their Republican counterparts to “get working” on bipartisan AI proposals. But he also announced plans to hold a series of “insight” forums in the fall with top experts to solicit input on how lawmakers should move ahead on legislation.
The comments could kick off a wide-ranging push to craft new AI policies and guardrails across the chamber. Lawmakers have introduced a slew of proposals in recent years to set new privacy protections for digital services and to require companies to vet their products for biases, but the bills have gained limited traction. Schumer’s focus on the issue could rekindle those efforts.
Some consumer advocates, however, criticized Schumer’s address for not sufficiently acknowledging years of discussions over potential AI rules on Capitol Hill.
Ben Winters, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center advocacy group, said that casting AI as a novel challenge “erases a lot of the progress that has been made about articulating the harms of AI . . . and what are some ideas to regulate it.” And he expressed concern that Schumer is putting too much emphasis on boosting innovation rather than setting guardrails for the development and deployment of AI.
“It seems like they are prioritizing Schumer seeming forward-thinking rather than recognizing the reality of the circumstance,” Winters said in an interview.
Schumer’s comments arrive as policymakers across Washington race to develop a strategy to maximize the benefits of AI while containing its potential harms, which industry leaders and advocates have warned range from amplifying falsehoods to threatening human extinction.
The booming popularity of AI-driven chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard has both captivated and concerned officials, who have said they are worried about again failing to protect consumers from the perils of Silicon Valley’s latest craze. It has prompted lawmakers to hold a wave of public hearings and private meetings with industry leaders, researchers and advocates as they look to get their bearings in the quickly changing AI field.
While federal lawmakers for years have hammered social media companies including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for purportedly undermining U.S. democracy and surveilling users with little discretion, Congress has been unable to pass any major regulations for the tech sector.
The lack of movement on legislation to set guardrails for emerging technologies in Washington stands in stark contrast to the activity in Brussels, where policymakers in recent years have enacted sweeping proposals on data privacy, competition online and content moderation, with new AI rules on the horizon.
Schumer said officials overseas have “failed to capture the imagination of the world” for what a government approach to AI could look like, and that the United States could still set a global regulatory standard that over countries looked to. He said he will work on developing an “American” approach to harnessing the technology that stands in contrast to more restrictive proposals from U.S. rivals such as China.
Schumer urged his Senate colleagues to “cast aside ideological hang-ups and political self-interest” and work on a bipartisan basis to develop “comprehensive” AI legislation, a lengthy process that the Senate leader and his allies have said could take months to iron out.
Schumer’s speech follows years of warnings from consumer advocates about the risks of AI, as they raise concerns that the technology will supercharge surveillance, misinformation and biases in society. The recent boom in generative AI has sparked new alarm, and some tech critics have converged on Washington in recent months to warn lawmakers that recent advances in AI could be as risky as the advent of nuclear weapons.
Some have also expressed concern about industry’s influence over pending AI regulations, as Schumer holds AI meetings with Tesla chief executive Elon Musk and Microsoft President Brad Smith. Sam Altman, the chief executive of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, has also been running an extensive Washington charm offensive, seeking to shape the regulatory debate over AI.
Representatives from both Google and Meta said they “welcomed” the senator’s approach. “We welcome [Schumer’s] bipartisan effort to develop regulation that helps the U.S. promote beneficial and responsible AI innovation,” Google head of global affairs Kent Walker said in a tweet. Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, called it a “welcome intervention” and said it’s “incumbent on the tech companies building powerful AI technologies to do so in a spirit of openness & collaboration. We look forward to participating in this bipartisan initiative.”
Details about what legislation Schumer will pursue remain sparse, and his timeline for putting together a legislative package remains unclear. But he laid out five principles Wednesday to guide lawmakers on AI legislation — including security, accountability and explainability — that expand on a “high-level” framework he first teased in April.
“It’s not going to be days or weeks, but it’s not going to be years. Months would be the proper timeline that I would give you,” Schumer said in a brief onstage interview after the speech.
In a memo broadly detailing the approach, Schumer called it “an all-hands-on-deck effort in the Senate, with committees developing bipartisan legislation, and a bipartisan gang of non-committee chairs working to further develop the Senate’s policy response.”
The memo calls for requiring that “AI systems align with our democratic values at their core,” while supporting “the deployment of responsible systems” that tackle concerns about misinformation, bias and liability, support copyright holders and protect intellectual property.
In addition to discussing potential guardrails, Schumer suggested that “federal intervention” may be needed to “encourage innovation” in the space. The remarks signal that the Senate may consider new funding to boost research and innovation on AI.
Schumer nodded to concerns voiced by President Biden’s antitrust enforcers and former federal advisers that large tech companies could come to dominate AI, saying in his address that Congress must ensure that “innovation and competition is open to everyone, not just the few big powerful companies.”
Schumer last week held the first of three planned all-member AI briefings that he said will consider how the technology could impact the workforce, national security, copyright, privacy and other issues.
“We need the best of the best sitting at the table: the top AI developers, top executives, scientists, advocates, community leaders, workers, national security experts all together in one room, doing years of work in a matter of months,” Schumer told a small crowd of researchers, consumer advocates and industry representatives Wednesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The Washington Post’s Gerrit De Vynck and Cat Zakrzewski contributed to this report.
