TECH TITANS ARE GIVING SENATORS ADVICE ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN A CLOSED-DOOR FORUM

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has been talking for months about accomplishing a potentially impossible task: passing bipartisan legislation within the next year that encourages the rapid development of artificial intelligence and mitigates its biggest risks.

On Wednesday, he convened a meeting of some of the country's most prominent technology executives, among others, to ask them how Congress should do it.

The closed-door forum on Capitol Hill included almost two dozen tech executives, tech advocates, civil rights groups and labor leaders. The guest list featured some of the industry’s biggest names: Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and X and Tesla’s Elon Musk as well as former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates. All 100 senators were invited; the public was not.

Schumer, D-N.Y., opened the session by saying that “today, we begin an enormous and complex and vital undertaking: building a foundation for bipartisan AI policy that Congress can pass.”

Schumer, who was leading the forum with Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., will not necessarily take the tech executives’ advice as he works with colleagues to try and ensure some oversight of the burgeoning sector. But he is hoping they will give senators some realistic direction as he tries to do what Congress has not been able to do for many years: pass meaningful regulation of the tech industry.

“It’s going to be a fascinating group because they have different points of view,” Schumer said in an interview before the event. “Hopefully we can weave it into a little bit of some broad consensus.”

Rounds, who joined Schumer in the interview, said Congress needs to get ahead of fast-moving AI by making sure it continues to develop “on the positive side” while also taking care of potential issues surrounding data transparency and privacy.

“AI is not going away, and it can do some really good things or it can be a real challenge,” Rounds said.