Today, the House Committee on Space, Science, and Technology will be holding a markup on a series of AI bills. Juan Londoño, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, released the following statement ahead of this hearing:

“Most of the bills up for markup present a consistent theme: prepare public institutions for the AI future. These bills ramp up efforts to prepare our education system to adopt and promote AI leadership, amp up the federal government’s AI research and data collection efforts, and build a body of experts to aid in AI policymaking.

“The bills largely build on the path laid out by the discussion draft of the first comprehensive AI bill in Congress, and this markup signals positive momentum that Congress is ready to reclaim its legislative authority over AI and tech policy at large.

“Most notably, one of the bills, HR 9363, will establish the Center for AI Security and Innovation (CAISI), a variation on the most common proposals to create a Center of AI experts under NIST. Under this regime, most of CAISI’s functions will be narrowly tailored to serve in the existing ad-hoc evaluation process that the White House leads alongside the intelligence community. While this narrowed-down CAISI could make this process more technical, predictable, and less vulnerable to political manipulation, the resulting evaluation scheme still gives the executive an undue amount of discretion in comparison to other governance proposals.”

To speak with Londoño on today’s markup, contact Christopher Tarvardian.