Senators propose $32B on AI spending without firm regulatory oversight – Computerworld

A bipartisan group of four US Senators on Wednesday recommended Congress allocate $32 billion during the next three years to develop artificial intelligence (AI) and to put in place regulatory guardrails around it.

Led by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), two Democrats and two Republicans developed a 33-page report of recommendations that appeared to fall short of any actual legislation to reign in the fast-evolving, disruptive technology. The senators have been working on the proposal for about a year.

Their plan would ask Congress to increase funding for AI innovation by “at least” $32 billion per year “in order to propel US leadership in AI, maintain our global competitiveness, and perform cutting-edge AI research and development.”

The proposal also calls for enforcement of “existing laws for AI,” including addressing any gaps or unintended harmful bias; prioritizing the development of standards for testing to understand potential AI harms; “and developing use case-specific requirements for AI transparency and explainability.”

The report recommends also establishing a federal data privacy framework and mitigating the threat of potential long-term risk scenarios.

“No technology offers more promise to our modern world than artificial intelligence,” Schumer said in a statement. “But AI also presents a host of new policy challenges. Harnessing the potential of AI demands an all-hands-on-deck approach and that’s exactly what our bipartisan AI working group has been leading.”

In March, the European Union passed the world’s first comprehensive AI law, aimed at regulating the makers and vendors of AI technology. The European Union AI Act received an overwhelmingly favorable vote.  The law created a number of safeguards on general purpose AI, limits the use of biometric identification systems by law enforcement, bans online social scoring and AI to manipulate or exploit user vulnerabilities, and gives consumers the right to launch complaints and get “meaningful explanations” from AI providers.

In the US, the Bipartisan Senate AI Working Group — comprising Sens. Schumer, Mike Rounds (R-SD),  Martin Heinrich (D-NM), and Todd Young (R-IN) — released an AI policy roadmap summarizing their findings. The report also lays out policy topics the group believes merit bipartisan committee consideration in Congress. 

The AI Working Group is not the first to attempt to wrangle in the fast pace of generative AI (genAI) and general AI development and adoption. In February, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) enlisted more than 200 companies and organizations to participate in the AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC) to devise guidelines for ensuring the safety of AI systems.

Amazon.com, Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, the Free Software Foundation, and Visa are all members of AISIC, as well as several major developers of AI tools, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

To date, no single, comprehensive piece of legislation has addressed the many security, copyright, privacy and safety issues raised by the use of AI technology. Heinrich said the Senate AI Working Group’s proposal defines a clear roadmap to “unlock AI innovation… and help maintain” US leadership in the space.

“Most importantly, the roadmap lays out the guardrails necessary to mitigate the risks of AI — from blocking corporations from trying to use American’s data against them, to safeguarding the work of creative professionals and protecting workers’ jobs by preventing the automation of tasks that only should be done by humans. Now it’s time for the Senate to act on these recommendations,” Heinrich said in a joint statement with the other group’s members.