Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On The Senate’s Second Bipartisan AI Insight Forum Taking Place Today

Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor on the second bipartisan AI Insight Forum, taking place this afternoon. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:

Later this afternoon, the Senate will hold our second bipartisan AI Insight Forum, focusing on our North Star for AI: innovation.

Our forum begins at 3:00 o’clock today in the Kennedy Caucus Room and I encourage my colleagues from both sides of the aisle to attend.

We had a strong, bipartisan turnout for our inaugural AI Insight Forum, and I hope we’ll see the same today. It’s important to show how bipartisan and how seriously we’re taking AI here in the Senate.

Today’s AI Insight Forum includes some of the nation’s leading voices in labor, academia, business, tech, civil rights, and others, coming together to hold an unvarnished, candid, and urgent debate on AI.

The topic today will be how Congress and the private sector can foster innovation. We’ll talk about the need for transformative innovation: the types of AI systems that will create new vistas, unlock new cures, improve education, protect national security, preserve the global food supply, and more.

But we will also talk about the need for sustainable innovation: innovations that can solve the deep challenges of AI – like increasing transparency and security, and reducing bias and risk – and this means supporting effective guardrails, because everyone agreed at our last forum, one end of the spectrum to the other, that if the federal government doesn't impose some guardrails there will be none, and the whole invention of A.I. could come tumbling down.

We need to prioritize both transformative and sustainable innovation. We must find a balance between innovation and guardrails, without going too far in one direction hurting the other.

I want to thank my colleagues in our bipartisan AI gang — Senators Rounds, Heinrich, and Young — for helping organize and run today’s AI Insight Forum.

Again, for the information of Senators, our forum begins at 3:00 p.m. today in the Kennedy Caucus Room. I hope to see you all there.

###