Talk of artificial intelligence has been inescapable on Capitol Hill this year, and both Republicans and Democrats have been eager to put their mark on shaping the future of AI policy.
With only a few legislative days left in the year, the House Bipartisan Task Force on Artificial Intelligence on Tuesday released a much-anticipated report with dozens of policy recommendations and legislative proposals on how to regulate, promote development and mitigate possible pitfalls when it comes to AI.
“We’re recommending in this task force report that Congress balances the very important job of mitigating the potential harms of artificial intelligence and providing Americans with the protections that they deserve against some of the malicious use of AI,” Rep. Jay Obernolte, the Republican co-chair of the task force, said in a press conference.
The group’s recommendations touch on more than a dozen fields, such as government use of AI, data privacy, regulating deepfakes, AI intellectual property and artificial intelligence’s potential to create false and misleading content.
Deepfakes have increasingly become a problem for legislators to reckon with and it is personal. A recent study from the American Sunlight Project found that more than two dozen (mostly female) members of Congress have been victims of sexually explicit deepfakes. The report recommends Congress implement a national identity verification system to counter deepfakes without infringing on “speech that is protected by the First Amendment.”
Democratic Rep. Bill Foster says that by creating a digital verification system, similar to a plan in the European Union, the government would also be able to minimize online identity theft.
Foster also called on the nascent Department of Government Efficiency to support the implementation of such a system.
“I’m hopeful that the DOGE committee looking at government efficiency will look at the amount of time and money that we waste by not having a secure digital ID in it and fix it,” Foster said.
“There was between $60 and $120 billion of COVID fraud, much of it identity fraud. And this did not happen in countries that have a secure digital ID,” Foster said.
State-sponsored cybersecurity attacks have also become a major threat. Florida Rep. Laurel Lee says AI could become a tool to improve cybersecurity and protect infrastructure against foreign actors.
While the report is still a preliminary view of what artificial intelligence regulation could look like in the near future, for now it is clear that there is a bipartisan appetite to regulate the most dangerous uses of AI.
Launched by House leadership in February of this year, the bipartisan task force was created with the intent of developing a series of legislation proposals for the safe development of AI. Now that the report is out, the task force, Democratic Rep. Ami Bera said, shouldn’t just disappear.
“My hope would be, and I think that most members on the task force would be — because there’s still a lot of work left to do — that either they continue the task force or maybe it turns into a more formal select subcommittee.”
During Tuesday’s press conference, Obernolte said it is still unclear what the future of the task force would be, but that it was clear that Congress should take action.
“We have been very vocal in the belief that something needs to be done,” Obernolte said.
While the report’s recommendations currently enjoy bipartisan support and were adopted by the task force unanimously, it is still unclear which — if any — of these would make it to the president’s desk and signed into law, especially under a Trump administration.
The most conservative voices in the Republican Party, like the House Freedom Caucus and Sen. Rand Paul, have been skeptical in the past of government efforts to reduce misinformation. And many of them remain suspicious of the agencies spearheading these efforts.
President-elect Donald Trump has pivoted his positions on emergent technologies. Trump was a prominent skeptic of cryptocurrencies and tried to ban social media platforms like TikTok during his first administration.
Now, his positions toward tech regulation have changed, not without significant support from tech donors. Trump has said he plans to embrace cryptocurrencies and save TikTok from its upcoming ban. He also named the venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal, David Sacks, as his AI and crypto czar, with whom Obernolte said he would meet later today.
“This is not the last word in AI, our report is the beginning,” Obernolte said. “And it will only be effective if future Congresses implement some of the recommendations that we have created.”
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Samuel Larreal is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.