The Senate overwhelmingly rejected a 10-year moratorium proposal for state-level artificial intelligence (AI) regulations.
As reported by the Financial Times (FT), the senator voted 99-1 early Tuesday (July 1) for an amendment that removed the ban’s language from President Donald Trump’s tax/expenditure bill.
The vote, as the FT notes, is a defeat for the large tech companies, and said the ban will help prevent inconsistent state-by-state rules that could hinder innovation.
“We want to be the leaders of AI and Quantum. All these new technologies.” “And the way to do that is not bringing the heavy hand of the government. It’s by going in with a light touch.”
However, the proposal was criticized by other Republicans. Other Republicans have flagged concerns about preventing the nation from regulating strong and potentially destructive technologies.
“I think it’s a terrible policy. It’s a big giveaway for some of the worst business people out there,” said Sen. John Holy (R-Mo.), an opposing ban.
Hawley’s concerns reiterate the concerns of civil society groups, academic institutions, artists and technical workers who wrote about in their US homes.
“This moratorium means that even if companies intentionally design algorithms that cause foreseeable harm, regardless of how they destroy the intentional or terrible or consequences of fraud, they cannot explain the bad technology to lawmakers and the public,” the group said in the letter.
In other AI news, Pymnts wrote this week about an increasing skepticism about whether agent AI can autonomously complete tasks and take action outside of human involvement.
Future reports from PYMNTS Intelligence show that almost every Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of enterprise-level companies are familiar with Agent AI, but only 15% are considering making it work.
Rather than hiring recruitment across hiring, companies are evaluating and conducting exams. Agent AI may be a ubiquitous topic, but it is not a fixture in the business world.
“The obvious thing about the data is that companies exploring agent AI are already deepening their way through generating AI, a less important technology like ChatGPT, which is used to create content that contains reports, field customer service queries, code software, and data,” writes Pymnts.
