State-level AI regulation ban emerging as D.C. flashpoint

Yahoo

2 days ago

BOSTON (SHNS) – Governors and legislatures 'won't be happy' if the federal government bars them from enacting any state-level regulations on artificial intelligence for the next decade, U.S. Sen. Ed Markey said Wednesday while pledging an effort to get the policy rider tossed from a funding bill.
The junior senator from Massachusetts convened civil rights activists and academic experts for a virtual event, where they escalated their opposition to a provision in the U.S. House-approved reconciliation package imposing a 10-year moratorium on state AI restrictions.
Markey said that when the bill emerges in the U.S. Senate, he will try to have it eliminated 'as a violation of the Senate rules for reconciliation.'
'We have to be clear about the provision: rather than proposing any plan to address the risks of AI, [the bill would] say you can't do anything about it. But governors are not going to be happy with that, state legislatures won't be happy with it, and I think increasingly, Republicans and Democrats are not going to be happy with it,' Markey said Wednesday.
Alondra Nelson, a former Biden administration science official who is now a professor at Princeton University's Institute for Advanced Study, argued that governments cannot wait another decade before pursuing limitations on the use of AI and automated decision-making systems.
'AI systems are already, today, reshaping equality and opportunity in real people's lives. We know that IRS algorithms have disproportionately targeted black taxpayers for audits. We know that facial recognition systems are already leading to wrongful arrests. We know already that insurance companies are using surveillance data that creates discriminatory pricing for different Americans. We know that the uses of AI in health care are sometimes missing cancer in darker-skin patients while detecting it in other patients,' Nelson said. 'These aren't hypothetical future risks. They're certainly not risks that we can wait for 10 years to address. These are documented harms that are happening to members of the American public right now.'
The U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee added the moratorium language to the budget reconciliation bill. At a markup hearing last month, committee chair Rep. Brett Guthrie of Kentucky said the proposal would implement 'guardrails that protect against state-level AI laws that could jeopardize our technological leadership.'
However, the proposal has drawn some bipartisan pushback. Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said Tuesday she did not know the 10-year AI regulation ban was in the bill when she voted to advance it and is 'adamantly OPPOSED to this.'
She added that she would not vote in favor of the finalized bill — which cleared the House by a one-vote margin — if it returns from the Senate still containing the moratorium.
Forty attorneys general, both Democrats and Republicans, jointly penned a letter to congressional leaders on May 16 announcing opposition to the provision, warning that its impact 'would be sweeping and wholly destructive of reasonable state efforts to prevent known harms associated with AI.'
Attorneys general previously called for federal AI governance to focus on 'high risk' systems with emphasis on transparency, testing and enforcement.
Attorney general letter on AI moratoriumDownload
'Rather than follow the recommendation from the bipartisan coalition of State Attorneys General, the amendment added to the reconciliation bill abdicates federal leadership and mandates that all states abandon their leadership in this area as well,' the 40 AGs wrote in the letter circulated by the National Association of Attorneys General. 'This bill does not propose any regulatory scheme to replace or supplement the laws enacted or currently under consideration by the states, leaving Americans entirely unprotected from the potential harms of AI. Moreover, this bill purports to wipe away any state-level frameworks already in place.'
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell was among the letter's signatories.
On Beacon Hill, elected officials have been weighing the potential risks of AI against the economic upsides of a fast-growing industry. Lawmakers and Gov. Maura Healey last year included $100 million in an economic development bond bill to create a Massachusetts AI Hub, which Healey's office said would 'facilitate the application of artificial intelligence across the state's ecosystem.'
Lawmakers targeted AI in several bills pending this term, proposing new guardrails around its use in health care decision-making, additional consumer protection measures, a study on greenhouse gas emissions from the electrically demanding technology, and more.
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