The field of artificial intelligence is already having a positive impact in a multitude of ways on our daily lives and on America’s economy, health, welfare, and national security. AI is providing earlier detection and treatment of cancers, strokes, heart disease, sepsis, and many of our most feared and costly health problems. It is helping emergency management officials map wildfire paths for quicker and better responses and with fraud and spam detection. And it is cutting state and local government operations budgets, advancing supply chain management, and broadening financial inclusion by bringing more tools to retail investors.
But now, the economic buzzkills at the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department threaten to halt the vast AI innovation ecosystem with massive antitrust investigations into America’s cutting-edge companies without identifying any reasonable examples of consumer harm or anti-competitive behavior.
In a recent interview, FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan was asked which areas of AI she was looking at in a soon-to-be-unveiled antitrust investigation into Nvidia, Microsoft, and OpenAI. She modestly replied, “Everything … from the chips to the cloud to the fashions to the downstream apps.”
She also described her efforts, quite outrageously, as an attempt to go after the “mob boss.” Khan’s continued derogatory descriptions of America’s leading tech companies make her sound more like a conspiracy theorist than a reasoned agency chairwoman.
This kind of arrogance is what makes Khan one of the most unpopular figures in Washington right now. Last year, even progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) said: “I respect Lina Khan, but I don’t think the FTC should be making AI policy for the U.S. The president and Congress should be [doing so] with the input of a lot of stakeholders.”
In fact, Congress has been very engaged in gathering input, discussing policy, and holding very constructive hearings on AI, such as this month’s joint economic hearing titled “Artificial Intelligence and its Prospects to Fuel Economic Growth and Improve Governance.”
Testifying before the committee, technology scholar Adam Thierer said AI is set to become the “most important general-purpose technology of our era” and emphasized the importance of getting our nation’s AI policy right. He convincingly argued for regulatory humility and restraint to give this exciting technology the necessary breathing room to grow during its early stages of development.
This hearing followed a bipartisan report released by a Senate AI working group titled “Driving U.S. Innovation in Artificial Intelligence,” which lays out a detailed policy road map for approaching the risks and benefits of AI. The bipartisan working group, consisting of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sens. Mike Rounds (R-SD), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), and Todd Young (R-IN), made recommendations on a half-dozen pieces of existing legislation while identifying areas for further policymaking consideration.
It’s not just Congress that has been thoughtfully gathering public and private players to discuss the problems in the AI space. The Chamber of Commerce put together a Commission on Artificial Intelligence headed up by former Rep. John Delaney (D-MD) and Rep. Mike Ferguson (R-NJ), which spent a year bringing together experts, civil society, unions, government officials, and other important stakeholders that also made policy recommendations.
And in 2021, the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence concluded that the United States is “not sufficiently prepared to defend or compete against China in the AI era.”
Indeed, the kind of unnecessary meddling and micromanaging that Khan and the DOJ antitrust division have been known for threatens to scare away vital investment, slow innovation to a crawl, and further undermine U.S. leadership vis-a-vis China.
It is also reminiscent of the failed approach of European regulators, who have regulated their way into technological irrelevance. While the U.S. boasts 18 of the world’s 25 largest technology firms, it’s hard to find any major digital leaders hailing from the European Union.
We know that China is our biggest adversary in this field, and the U.S. cannot afford to cede our leadership. If ham-handed antitrust interference is how the federal government wants to welcome the next great technological revolution, then we shouldn’t be surprised to see the best and brightest AI minds start looking for friendlier shores.
The smartest path forward is to stick with the light-touch, permissionless innovation framework that has made the U.S. the undisputed global technology leader and the most fertile ground for world-changing entrepreneurship and invention.
It’s not often we see Congress working so diligently on a topic of such interest to the public. It is even rarer to see both sides of the aisle working together. Let’s allow them to do their job and not acquiesce to misguided ideologues attacking leading innovators who offer so much promise for our economy and global leadership.
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Barbara Comstock is a former U.S. congresswoman from Virginia and a senior adviser for Baker Donelson.