Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On Yesterday’s Historic First-Ever All-Senators Classified Briefing On Artificial Intelligence

Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor about the first-ever all-Senators classified Senate briefing on AI that took place yesterday. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here.  

Yesterday, the Senate held its first ever – its first ever – classified briefing on the national security implications of artificial intelligence.

It was an eye-opening presentation. Many of us have spent a lot of time educating ourselves on AI, talking with the experts, holding hearings – but yesterday’s briefing was a candid wakeup call on how truly complicated AI is, and how much work, hard work, we have before us. This will be an ongoing effort – we want to move quickly, but not too quickly. We need to move quickly so bad countries, authoritarian countries, and bad actors – not countries themselves – don't get ahead of us. But we can’t move too quickly because we have to get this right and it’s very complicated. AI action will not be a matter of weeks, nor of years, but rather of months.

I want to thank my colleagues who attended yesterday’s briefing – we had a terrific turnout of roughly seventy members, even better than the first.

I want to thank the briefers by name: Dr. Arati Prabhakar, Director of the White House Office of Science and Tech, Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence, Kathleen Hicks, Deputy Secretary of Defense, Vice Admiral Trey Whitworth, Director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, And Dr. Craig Martell, Chief Digital and AI Officer at DoD.

Each briefer was clear, concise and informative, and I was gratified that my Republican colleagues came out of the briefing and said yes, this was a real back and forth, not just some people reading a piece of paper and not answering questions.

Now, for sure we’re not done – very soon I will announce the timing for our third all-Senate briefing, and again urge my colleagues to attend, especially those who couldn’t make the first two briefings. Learning as much as we can about AI, as quickly as possible, is essential.

AI is unlike anything Congress has dealt with before. It moves and changes so quickly, is going to affect our world so dramatically, is so much deeper in its complexity, and lies so far outside our expertise. Coming up with legislative solutions will be one of the most difficult things Congress has ever, ever faced, so these briefings are an important initial step.

And I don’t kid myself on how difficult this is going to be. Some people said why did I decide to take this on. Well, just because an issue is difficult or unfamiliar to Congress is no excuse to turn away, especially when it is so important and is going to have such a huge effect on every American and every person in the world's lives. We can’t throw our hands in the air and hope someone else figures it out. Of the many things yesterday’s briefing made clear, one of them was that government must play a role in making sure AI works for society’s benefit.

The private sector has made stunning progress innovating on AI, and Congress needs to be careful not to curb or hinder that innovation.

But we're going to need guardrails, and the only agent that can do that is government. Yes, some companies may put guardrails on their own, but when another company refuses to put on those guardrails, that company, the original company, will feel the pressure – political, or more importantly, economic – and say, look, we can't have those guardrails either.

Even if many developers have good intentions, there are always going to be rogue actors, unscrupulous companies, and foreign adversaries that seek to harm us and discard any guardrails at all.

And we can’t expect companies to adopt guardrails, as I said, if their competitors won’t be forced to do so as well. So it’s a task only the government can do, with help and input from the experts. And even those AI companies that are way out front on this now admit that they need some government action, we need some kinds of guardrails.

Later this year, Congress will host the first ever AI Insight Forums to bring the best developers, experts, and legislators in one room, to identify the areas where we can take action, to make sure we’re asking the right questions to begin with. Ensuring our national security and safety will be one of the most important issues we discuss.

And I want to thank everyone who attended yesterday. It was bipartisan, and we must keep this issue bipartisan. How to deal with AI is not a Republican issue, it's not a Democratic issue: it's a national issue. And I really want to thank our little group of Senators Heinrich, Rounds, Young for helping organize these briefings, I look forward to the third briefing soon.

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