A bipartisan forum on artificial intelligence has irked populist firebrands who say Big Tech CEOs should not be advising the Senate behind closed doors.
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will host the first "AI Insights Forum" on Wednesday, one step in a monthslong initiative to place guardrails on U.S. innovation in the space. The event has drawn headlines for its "all-star" list of attendees, among them Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. But that guest list has also proven to be a point of friction in the Senate.
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a member of Schumer's leadership team, denounced his decision to hold the all-day meeting, in which experts will discuss a series of preselected topics, in private.
"Look, if tech billionaires want to lobby Congress to write rules in ways that will protect their near-monopolies, then they can do that out in public, not behind closed doors," she told the Washington Examiner.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), one of a handful of Republicans to work with Warren on regulating corporate power, was similarly skeptical of the CEOs' motives. Both have called for Big Tech companies to be broken up.
"This is exactly how these guys roll, all the time. They did the same thing with social media," he said, infusing his criticism with conservative gripes about Section 230, the law that shields tech giants from liability for the content on their platforms.
"It's all, 'Let us tell you how to shape the regulatory environment in a way that maximally benefits us,' meaning them, and I just have no interest in that project," he added.
Yet that critique was not uniform among populists on Capitol Hill. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who rails against corporations from his perch as chairman of the Senate's health and labor committee, saw no problem with the way the forum had been organized.
"I think bringing folks together and having an exchange of ideas is fine," he said. "I mean, it's not a question of advising — it’s a question of having a dialogue and listening."
And even ardent Republican critics of Big Tech welcomed the testimony of industry executives.
"I think that's an odd idea," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said of Warren's objections. "We should hear input from everybody involved. And at the same time, elected members of Congress should be able to make up their own minds."
Cruz, as ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, is probing whether companies such as Meta and Google are throttling conservative content.
Global investments in artificial intelligence, which could revolutionize everything from medicine to agriculture, will grow to around $200 billion by 2025, according to Goldman Sachs. But the opportunities, for businesses and society at large, also come with perils, including the displacement of workers and, in doomsday scenarios, the extinction of the human race.
Schumer has convened a bipartisan working group to address the challenges posed by AI and held a series of classified briefings for senators earlier this summer. The Wednesday forum is just the first of nine he says the Senate will hold in the coming months.
Warren is receptive to input from industry executives who hope to shape the future of artificial intelligence but says the Wednesday meeting denies senators the chance to ask questions and hold their companies accountable.
"We have a forum for doing that. It's called a hearing. They come — in some cases, they get sworn in — and senators get to ask them tough questions. None of that is in this setup," she said.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), who led one such hearing on Tuesday, emphasized that's exactly his goal, noting that several executives, including the leaders of Microsoft and OpenAI, have testified before his Judiciary subcommittee.
But he rejected the idea that senators should limit their interactions with tech executives. He noted that he met with Brad Smith, the Microsoft president, ahead of Tuesday's hearing and said testimony from witnesses like them helped inform the framework for AI he introduced with Hawley on Friday.
That framework would, among other things, require tech companies developing artificial intelligence to register with an independent oversight board and make clear Section 230 does not apply to AI.
"Let me just say I'm going to try to learn from whatever source is willing to be cooperative in sharing insights and facts that will help us protect the public against the perils of AI and achieve more of the promise," Blumenthal said.
Sen. Todd Young (R-IN), a member of Schumer's working group, offered a similar defense and challenged Warren and Hawley to offer up a list of outside experts they would like to see at the forums as a counterbalance.
"Who do they think should be on the list who’s not on the list?" he said, calling their criticism "unhelpful."
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), another working group member, noted that Schumer had cast a wide net in organizing the event, which will include labor leaders, civil rights activists, and academics.
"We’re looking at over 20 different individuals, and believe me, they compete with one another, they have differing points of view. And they have different thoughts about how it should be addressed," Rounds said.
Yet Hawley dismissed the additional attendees as a ploy to soften the optics of the "rich, mostly men who are going to be there and giving us this self-serving advice."
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"I just think it's very telling that this is who the majority leader thinks the Senate ought to be hearing from. You leave him to his own druthers, and who does he go and trumpet? 'Oh, let's get all the tech CEOs and let's hear from them,'" he said.
Schumer has not put a time frame on when he and his colleagues will introduce AI legislation but said its development is a matter of "months," not years. The Senate will have held around a dozen hearings on AI alone by the end of this week.