Heinrich, Schumer, Rounds, Young Host Press Conference Following Release of Bipartisan Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence Policy in the United States Senate

WASHINGTON — Today, U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich, co-chair and co-founder of the Senate Artificial Intelligence (AI) Caucus, hosted a press conference with his colleagues on the Bipartisan AI Working Group, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Todd Young (R-Ind.), and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), following the release of their roadmap for artificial intelligence policy in the U.S. Senate. A one-pager detailing the roadmap can be found here. The AI roadmap can be found here.

The roadmap follows months of discussion, hundreds of stakeholder meetings, and nine first-of-their-kind, all-Senator AI Insight Forums.

VIDEO: U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Todd Young (R-Ind.), and Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), May 15, 2024.

“There is an urgency right now for America to step up its game on AI and make sure that we maintain our competitiveness internationally,” said Heinrich. “This is a roadmap that lays out how we can get the most bipartisan policy in place using every tool in our toolbox.”

Find photos of the press conference here. 

Heinrich’s remarks, as delivered at today’s press conference, are below:

AI gives us the opportunity to take things that used to take us decades to develop and compresses that into weeks and months.

It's true in the medical arena with new drug therapies. It's true in the material science arena.

Things that used to literally take decades to understand can be done almost instantaneously now.

What we've done with this roadmap is map out for the committees where some of the areas of relative consensus are that are ripe for bipartisan action today.

Things like investment in research and development and the necessity of that to maintain our competitiveness. Democratizing some of that research and development to create AI legislation will allow those tools to be used by students anywhere in the nation, not just in the areas that dominate AI today.

Things like the Future of AI Innovation Act, which really formalizes some of the infrastructure to make sure that AI maintains a high level of safety.

I think this is a great document for all of our committee chairs to look at and figure out where to spend their time, where we're going to have some bipartisan consensus, and be able to move forward.

I know that in addition to the Rules Committee, I think the Commerce Committee may markup some of these ideas as early as next week.

I think there is an urgency right now for America to step up its game on AI and make sure that we maintain our competitiveness internationally.

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We'll use all of our vehicles to really drive the progress on this.

The very first AI policies were baked into the National Defense Authorization Act. Senator Rob Portman and I founded the AI caucus, in part to develop the workforce and to develop data standards.

The Department of Defense has a whole focus now on how to make data accessible within it, to the training models that we're using now. We can learn from that and extend that kind of progress to the intelligence authorization bill, to the Department of Energy, and to all of our science agencies.

This is really a roadmap to getting the most bipartisan policy in place, through every tool in our toolbox. 

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