Schumer summons tech titans for AI meetups
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer at an August 2023 White House event celebrating the 1-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act Celal Gunes/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are among the CEOs slated to take questions from lawmakers in a closed-door forum.
Ahead of its return from August recess, Congress is positioning itself to place artificial intelligence regulation at the top of its priority list, with lawmakers from both chambers angling to bring federal involvement into the emerging tech space.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., is slated to host several important private sector leaders in the first of his AI Insight Forums, beginning Sept. 13.
A representative from Schumer’s office told to Nextgov/FCW that the confirmed guest list includes Google CEO Sundar Pichai; Tesla, X and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk; NVIDIA President Jensen Huang; Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg; technologist and Google alum Eric Schmidt; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman; and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
These industry leaders, along with worker and civil rights advocacy groups, will join Schumer for a press-excluded “bipartisan forum.” Schumer’s gathering was first reported by Axios.
House lawmakers are looking to pass legislation focused on establishing data privacy laws for AI systems. Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., penned an op-ed in Newsweek on Tuesday advocating for a national privacy law that both creates a national data privacy standard and applies it to large language models like ChatGPT– a software product from OpenAI – which use potentially-sensitive online user data to train its AI algorithms.
“Ensuring there's transparency and accountability in what data goes into AI is also important for a quality and responsible product,” DelBene wrote.
Officials from DelBene’s office said that it is great to see Schumer’s “sense of urgency” in bringing in private sector participants to work with the government in potentially establishing more regulatory oversight.
“We want people to have control over their data, and right now, companies kind of control most of our data,” Nick Martin, a spokesperson for DelBene, told Nextgov/FCW. “I think we wanted to highlight that issue. And point to what we feel is a really strong solution here. We need to be a global leader here.”
Martin said he also hopes to continue to build off of Schumer’s momentum on the House side following strong bipartisan support in similar legislation and executive-level initiatives like the Biden-Harris administration’s AI Bill of Rights issued earlier this year.