This week, Senator Ted Cruz, Senate Commerce Committee Chair, presided over a hearing with Sam Altman and other AI industry execs.
Fascinating comments.
Here’s Senator Cruz’s opening statement:
Good morning. The Senate Committee on Commerce Science and Transportation is called to order welcome to our witnesses. Thank you for joining us this morning in the last two years AI has brought the United States and the world to a critical inflection point ai may be a technology as transformative as the internet or even more so.
It has unleashed a new global industrial revolution with the potential to unlock opportunities that improve our quality of life create jobs and stimulate economic growth the country that leads in AI will shape the 21st century global order.
As a matter of economic security as a matter of national security America has to beat China in the AI race china has made AI central to its national strategy and China aims to lead the world in AI by 2030 investing heavily in AI adoption across industries like manufacturing and defense.
In this race the United States is facing a fork in the road do we go down the path that embraces our history of entrepreneurial freedom and technological innovation or do we adopt the command and control policies of Europe. I would suggest that Congress draw on the lessons we can learn from the dawn of the internet in the early 1990s Washington embraced the internet and explicitly adopted a style of regulation that was intentionally and decisively light touch congress chose to deregulate under the Telecommunications Act of 1996 while President Clinton pursued tariff agreements and treaties that protected America’s intellectual property and technological exports further.
In 1998 Congress enacted a 10-year internet tax moratorum so that state laws wouldn’t bulcanize and styy the promise of e-commerce the results of these decisions were extraordinary i made a lot of money by 2000 the United States has recorded five straight years of historic highs in productivity gains and investment growth hundreds of thousands of new jobs were created and the United States became a top tech exporter with massive sums of private investment pouring into the US digital economy.
By contrast EU countries pursued a series of heavy-handed regulations that proved enormously costly in the United States and Europe had economies virtually identical in size. Today the American economy is more than 50% larger than Europe’s the drivers of that are tech and the shale revolution those two comprise virtually the entirety of that massive growth o over Europe according to one EU Commission report only 6% of global AI startup funding flows to EU firms. That is one tenth of the amount that is going to American companies. The report directly blames this yawning chasm on the EU’s nasty regulatory approach and yet the Biden administration for inexplicable reasons to align AI policy with the EU to adopt their failed policies. President Biden’s sweeping AI executive order the longest executive order in American history cast AI as dangerous and opaque laying the groundwork for audits for risk assessments and regulatory certifications. Biden’s approach inspired similar efforts in state legislatures across the country threatening to burden startups developers and AI users with heavy compliance cost. Some of my colleagues suggest that a friendlier version of the Biden approach makes sense they want a testing regime to guard against AI quote discrimination and have government agencies provide quote guidance documents seemingly something out of Orwell that will usher in what they call best practices as if AI engineers lack the intelligence to res responsibly build AI without the bureaucrats. Many in the industry foolishly have supported such paternalism harmful regulations take many forms Biden’s misguided midnight AI diffusion rule on chips and model weights would have crippled American tech companies ability to sell AI to the world the Biden plan would have handed over key markets to China.
We should want foreign countries particularly our our allies to buy American. I vocally opposed this rule for months and indeed the ranking member and I together urged the Biden administration not to adopt it and I’m very pleased that President Trump has now confirmed he plans to resend it. All of this busybody bureaucracy whether Biden’s industrial policy on chip exports or industry and regulator approved guidance documents is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. To lead in AI the United States cannot allow regulation even the supposedly benign kind to choke innovation or adoption. American dominance in AI depends on two factors innovation and adoption. Innovation drives breakthroughs and global competitiveness; adoption ensures that these tools empower American workers and businesses enabling the United States to become the world’s leading adopter and exporter of AI.
Thankfully President Trump has largely reversed Biden’s misguided AI agenda. In fact I think AI was a sleeper issue in this last elections. Americans wanted to see President Trump and Republicans and indeed all senators champion AI policies focused on innovation and adoption. The contrast has been astounding this year there have been over $1 trillion of new AI projects including major investments in Texas like the Corewave data center in Plano and the 500 billion dollar project Stargate in Abalene by OpenAI and Oracle and others. Adopting a light touch regulatory style for AI will require Congress to work alongside the president just as Congress did with President Clinton we need to advance legislation that promotes long-term AI growth and innovation. That’s why I will soon release a new bill that creates a regulatory sandbox for AI modeled on the approach taken by Congress and President Clinton at the dawn of the internet that will remove barriers to AI adoption pres prevent needless state overregulation and allow the AI supply chain to rapidly grow here in the United States.
That’s how we’ll accelerate economic growth secure US dominance in AI and beat China.