Avoiding mandates is a practical matter for the House committee. “Republicans don’t go in for mandates for the most part. They generally aren’t going to go for that. So we would have a hard time getting support,” says Vaughan. “We’ve heard concerns about stifling innovation, and that’s not the approach that we want to take.” When MIT Technology Review asked about the origin of these concerns, they were attributed to unidentified “third parties.”
And fears of slowing innovation don’t just come from the republican side. “What’s most important to me is that the United States of America is establishing aggressive rules of the road on the international stage,” says Representative Stevens. “It’s concerning to me that actors within the Chinese Communist Party could outpace us on these technological advancements.”
But these bills come at a time when big tech companies have ramped up lobbying efforts on AI. “Industry lobbyists are in an interesting predicament—their CEOs have said that they want more AI regulation, so it’s hard for them to visibly push to kill all AI regulation,” says David Evan Harris, who teaches courses on AI ethics at the University of California, Berkeley. “On the bills that they don’t blatantly try to kill, they instead try to make them meaningless by pushing to transform the language in the bills to make compliance optional and enforcement impossible.”
“A [voluntary commitment] is something that is also only accessible to the largest companies,” says Jernite at Hugging Face, claiming that sometimes the ambiguous nature of voluntary commitments allows big companies to set definitions for themselves. “If you have a voluntary commitment—that is, ‘We’re going to develop state-of-the-art watermarking technology’—you don’t know what state-of-the-art means. It doesn’t come with any of the concrete things that make regulation work.”
“We are in a very aggressive policy conversation about how to do this right, and how this carrot and stick is actually going to work,” says Representative Stevens, indicating Congress may put into place red lines in the future for AI companies not to cross.
There are other interesting insights to be gleaned from looking at the bills all together. Two-thirds of the AI bills are sponsored by Democrats. This isn’t too surprising, since some House Republicans have claimed to want no AI regulations, believing that guardrails will slow down progress.
The topics of the bills (as specified by Congress) are dominated by science, tech, and communications (28%), commerce (22%), updating government operations (18%), and national security (9%). Topics that don’t receive much attention include labor and employment (2%), environmental protection (1%), and civil rights, civil liberties, and minority issues (1%).
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