Even before Republicans took Congress this year, the betting odds on any major federal AI legislation in the near future haven’t looked particularly favorable.
But Rep. Jay Obernolte, co-chair of Congress’s bipartisan AI task force, said the House is by no means throwing in the towel, though new proposals might look different than some previous pushes. The California Republican, speaking on stage at the HumanX AI conference in Las Vegas this week, said his task force work convinced him bipartisan consensus on AI “is something that Congress is capable of.”
Former Vice President Kamala Harris also stopped by the event to reflect on her work as the Biden administration’s unofficial AI czar and weigh in on the future of governmental guardrails around the technology.
Last month, Harris’s successor, Vice President JD Vance, went to the AI Action Summit in Paris to lay out a vision for AI innovation that was intentionally light on “hand-wringing about safety,” as he put it. Harris gave a much different address at the same conference in London in 2023.
The time is now: At HumanX this week, Harris pushed back on the notion that innovation and safety are at odds. “It is an absolute false choice…We can and we must have both,” Harris said.
“If we don’t figure this out, I think we are losing this very specific moment in time that will or will not be about America’s leadership, not only on the piece that is about innovation, but the piece that is about global stability and safety. And so let’s deal with that.”
That urgency was one point on which Harris and Obernolte—who spoke in separate sessions—agreed. Obernolte said if Congress doesn’t act soon, it risks ceding authority to a patchwork of state laws, something that experts we’ve spoken to say is a distinct possibility.
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“We have to do our jobs in Congress of actually establishing this federal regulatory environment,” Obernolte said. “Once we’ve done that, then we need to pass preemption and make it clear to the states where they are free to regulate and what is preempted by the federal government. And if we don’t do that very soon, the states are going to be out in front of us, which is already happening.”
Difference of opinion: Obernolte and fellow co-chair Rep. Ted Lieu—both of whom have computer science or AI degrees—released a 250-plus-page report on AI regulation in December, laying out a roadmap of sorts.
Obernolte said there’s some “low-hanging fruit” issues that both sides of the aisle might readily agree on—non-consensual intimate imagery, fostering technical talent, evaluation frameworks, and standards. But he criticized Europe’s comprehensive approach to regulating AI; he argued the task is better left to sectoral regulators on an industry-by-industry basis.
Obernolte said he hopes that “common sense” aspects of Biden’s repealed AI executive order will be included in Trump’s future action plan on the topic, which the administration promised within 180 days. But he criticized parts as well, like the invocation of the Defense Production Act.
Harris emphasized to the audience of hundreds of tech professionals that the government and industry need to come to an understanding.
“The technology industry has arrived at a place that is highly skeptical of the role of government—and I’m generalizing, obviously—both because it has decided that government poses one thing and only one thing, which is an impediment to innovation. But two, sadly, increasingly, we’re seeing, for some there’s this question of, ‘Does government even matter? Is it relevant? Does it actually do anything?’ And so on both sides, we’ve got to fix this. We really do.”