Majority Leader Schumer Closing Remarks At The Senate’s Second AI Insight Forum

Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today closed the Senate’s second AI Insight Forum. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, as prepared for delivery:

This has been a truly enlightening discussion. Thank you all for lending your time, your ideas, and your expertise to our forum.

We covered a lot of good ground today, and I think we’ll all be walking out of the room with a deeper understanding of how to approach American-led AI innovation. I know I will.

Of course, we couldn’t explore all of our topics in as much detail as we would have liked, but it’s important to remember that today’s forum is still just the early stages of our efforts to tackle AI.

We’ll continue this conversation in weeks and months to come – in more forums like this and committee hearings in Congress – as we work to develop comprehensive, bipartisan AI legislation.

After today’s discussion, a few things are clear.

First, Congress can and must play a role in promoting American-led AI innovation.  In the first forum, we came out in agreement that government needs to play a crucial role in supporting American-led AI innovation and creating AI guardrails. This time, it is clear that American leadership on AI can’t be done on the cheap. Almost all of the experts in today’s Forum called for robust, sustained federal investment in private and public sectors to achieve our goals of American-led transformative and sustainable innovation in AI, which the National Security AI Commission said would cost at least $32 billion in annual non-defense funding.

Second, that we must target this funding effectively, leveraging the private sector by employing new and innovative funding mechanisms – like the Grand Challenges prize idea.

Third, we must prioritize transformational innovation, to help create new vistas, unlock new cures, improve education, reinforce national security, protect the global food supply, and more.

Fourth, we must also encourage sustainable innovation, to minimize the harms that come from AI, like job loss, racial and gender bias, economic displacement and the risk that this technology goes off the rails altogether.

Finally, we need to strike a balance between transformational and sustainable innovation. Finding this balance will be key to our success.

Again, none of this will be easy, but it is essential to ensure U.S. leadership on AI in the years ahead.

So, thank you all again for being here. Thank you to my colleagues, Senators Rounds, Heinrich, and Young. And thank you to my fellow Senators who stopped by to listen.

I look forward to working with all of you on this great endeavor.

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