Senators Propose $32 Billion in Annual AI Spending but Defer Regulation

WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of senators released a long-awaited legislative plan for artificial intelligence Wednesday, calling for billions in funding to propel American leadership in the technology while offering few details on regulations to address its risks.

In a 20-page document titled “Driving U.S. Innovation in Artificial Intelligence,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the majority leader, and three colleagues called for spending $32 billion annually by 2026 for government and private-sector research and development of the technology.

The lawmakers recommended creating a federal data privacy law and said they supported legislation, planned for introduction Wednesday, that would prevent the use of realistic misleading technology known as deepfakes in election campaigns. But they said congressional committees and agencies should come up with regulations on AI, including protections against health and financial discrimination, the elimination of jobs, and copyright violations caused by the technology.

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“It’s very hard to do regulations because AI is changing too quickly,” Schumer said in an interview. “We didn’t want to rush this.”

He designed the road map with Republican Sens. Mike Rounds of South Dakota and Todd Young of Indiana, and a fellow Democrat, Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, after their yearlong listening tour to hear concerns about new generative AI technologies. Those tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, can generate realistic and convincing images, videos, audio and text. Tech leaders have warned about the potential harms of AI, including the obliteration of entire job categories, election interference, discrimination in housing and finance, and even the replacement of humankind.

The senators’ decision to delay AI regulation widens a gap between the United States and the European Union, which this year adopted a law that prohibits AI’s riskiest uses, including some facial recognition applications and tools that can manipulate behavior or discriminate. The European law requires transparency around how systems operate and what data they collect. Dozens of U.S. states have also proposed privacy and AI laws that would prohibit certain uses of the technology.

Outside of recent legislation mandating the sale or ban of the social media app TikTok, Congress hasn’t passed major tech legislation in years, despite multiple proposals.

“It’s disappointing because at this point we’ve missed several windows of opportunity to act while the rest of the world has,” said Amba Kak, a co-executive director of the nonprofit AI Now Institute and a former adviser on AI to the Federal Trade Commission.

Schumer’s efforts on AI legislation began in June with a series of high-profile forums that brought together tech leaders including Elon Musk of Tesla, Sundar Pichai of Google and Sam Altman of OpenAI.

Schumer said in the interview that through the forums, lawmakers had begun to understand the complexity of AI technologies and how expert agencies and congressional committees were best equipped to create regulations.

The legislative road map encourages greater federal investment in the growth of domestic research and development.

“This is sort of the American way — we are more entrepreneurial,” Schumer said in the interview, adding that the lawmakers hoped to make “innovation the North Star.”

In a separate briefing with reporters, he said the Senate was more likely to consider AI proposals piecemeal instead of in one large legislative package.

“What we’d expect is that we would have some bills that certainly pass the Senate and hopefully pass the House by the end of the year,” Schumer said. “It won’t cover the whole waterfront. There’s too much waterfront to cover, and things are changing so rapidly.”

He added that his staff had spoken with House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office

Maya Wiley, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, participated in the first forum. She said the closed-door meetings were “tech industry heavy” and that the report’s focus on promoting innovation overshadowed the real-world harms that could result from AI systems, noting that health and financial tools had already shown signs of discrimination against certain ethnic and racial groups.

Wiley has called for greater focus on the vetting of new products to make sure they are safe and operate without biases that can target certain communities.

“We should not assume that we don’t need additional rights,” she said.

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