Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has unveiled the US government’s plan to regulate artificial intelligence (AI), alongside a warning that AI was unlike anything Congress has dealt with before and lawmakers were “starting from scratch.”
The SAFE Innovation Framework for AI policy was launched by Schumer in a speech in Washington on Wednesday.
He said the top minds in AI including developers, executives, scientists, advocates, community leaders, workers, and national security experts, would come before Congress in the fall for a series of AI Insight Forums to create the foundation for AI policy.
The topics will cover what Schumer described as the biggest issues in AI such as worker protection, copyright and intellectual property, national security, privacy and liability, and “guarding against doomsday scenarios.”
“No question about it: this is all exceedingly ambitious,” Schumer said in his speech and also warned that success was not guaranteed but that Congress was up to the challenge.
“AI is unlike anything that we’ve dealt with before, and it may be exceedingly difficult for legislation to tackle every single issue,” he said.
“It’s not like labor or healthcare or defense where Congress has a long history we can work off of. Experts aren’t even sure which questions policymakers should be asking. In many ways, we’re starting from scratch.”
Schumer also addressed criticism around how long it has taken Congress to come up with a plan to regulate AI, stating: “I know many of you have spent months calling on us to act. I hear you loud and clear. Many of my colleagues—from both sides of the aisle—hear you loud and clear.”
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