This week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will convene a group of lawmakers to hear from activists, technologists, and union leaders on the progress of artificial intelligence. It will be the first in a series of “listening sessions,” but make no mistake, this is the first step toward sweeping federal regulation of AI technology.

It’s clear where congressional Democrats stand on the matter. They’ve promised to do “years of work in a matter of months” when it comes to regulating this new sector. On the other hand, Republicans — and conservatives in general, who are enduringly and rightly concerned about government overreach — have been vague.

That must change immediately.

It is time to set a right-of-center legislative agenda for this powerful technology. AI offers promise and peril. For that reason, conservatives, too, should ensure that it is regulated — but sensibly regulated so that guardrails do not hurt America’s ability to compete with China, throttle domestic economic growth, or facilitate some form of techno-tyranny that subverts our constitutional regime.

Most conservatives understand the China threat. Beijing is determined to defeat the United States economically and militarily, including by developing cutting-edge AI. Worse, it has bounded forward by building off top-notch GPUs, the specialized chips used to train AI, imported from U.S. allies. We must be cleareyed about the fact that China, a nation indifferent to civil liberties, is not considering regulating AI. It is focused on getting ahead at whatever cost to individual liberty.

Thankfully, the existing export-control regime for dual-use technologies — and most experts agree that both GPUs and foundation models would qualify — provides the president with tremendous latitude to prevent the transfer of these components to China. A more intractable problem has been a leaky immigration policy that permits Chinese graduate students to study AI at our nation’s top universities.

It is well known that the CCP uses AI as the backbone of its totalitarian surveillance apparatus to oppress the Uyghur minority and others throughout China. Conservatives need to recognize that AI presents a dark temptation on our shores as well. AI possesses the ability to centralize digital control over society. The largest and most potent models will almost inevitably be built and owned by a handful of Big Tech corporations, the same that have colluded with the government to manipulate public discourse. The First Amendment would mean nothing if the digital public square is privately owned and impervious to the representative institutions of our democracy.

This threat could be in part curtailed by making both AI models and their training data available for review and analysis by independent experts. However, conservatives must be careful to limit the role of these experts, avoid concentrating the power of regulation in the hands of unelected bureaucrats, and prevent activists from squashing open-source AI alternatives to Big Tech.

There are economic implications for AI regulation as well. It is true that AI threatens certain work roles. However, research thus far suggests many of the jobs that will be affected by AI have already been either largely automated (e.g., the fast-food industry) or outsourced (e.g., call center workers). Additionally, the improved productivity brought about by AI would make America more cost-competitive and help keep jobs here — or even bring some back home.

To make AI further serve the worker, we need a regulatory framework that balances the need for innovation with the need to reward intellectual property stakeholders and incentivize human creativity. Rather than one-size-fits-all legislation, it makes far better sense to regulate AI by what it does in the economy, meaning domain-specific rules for manufacturing, transportation, finance, and other sectors.

Democrats, per usual, are prepared to throw around the federal government’s weight without regard to second- and third-order consequences. So Republican lawmakers must immediately step up and act prudently but forcefully, mitigating AI’s authoritarian potential while paving the way to harness its massive economic benefits.

Jonathan D. Askonas is an assistant professor of politics and a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. Follow him on X: @JonAskonas.