{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=BA4FB0B1-4269-4C9B-923C-263A44217D94", "Thune: Bipartisan AI Bill Promotes Transparency and Encourages Innovation", "2023-11-28", "2023", "2023-11", "Republican", "Senate", "SD", "John Thune", "T000250", "www.thune.senate.gov", "thune", "https://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases", "scraper", "WASHINGTON \u2014 U.S. Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) today spoke on the Senate floor about the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research, Innovation, and Accountability Act of 2023, his bipartisan bill that would bolster the United States\u2019 leadership and innovation in AI, improve transparency for consumers, and create common-sense safety and security guardrails for the highest-risk AI applications.\n\nThune\u2019s remarks below (as prepared for delivery):\n\n\u201cMr. President, artificial intelligence \u2013 or AI \u2013 has been with us for quite some time now.\n\n\u201cAnd whether it\u2019s the chatbot providing help on Amazon, or personalized recommendations on Netflix, or the algorithms curating your social media feeds, these days most of us interact with artificial intelligence on a daily basis.\n\n\u201cBut as the release of ChatGPT to the public last year demonstrated, artificial intelligence is about to take a giant step forward.\n\n\u201cThe AI applications I\u2019ve mentioned, like chatbots and personalized recommendations, are examples of so-called narrow AI \u2013 AI trained to perform specific tasks.\n\n\u201cBut ChatGPT is an example of the next generation of AI \u2013 artificial intelligence systems set up to imitate the human brain and produce original content based on the assimilation of vast sets of data.\n\n\u201cMr. President, this next generation of AI \u2013 so-called foundation models, which underpin systems like ChatGPT \u2013 offers tremendous possibilities.\n\n\u201cAdvances in medicine. In farming. In manufacturing.\n\n\u201cThe automation of routine tasks.\n\n\u201cNew ways to manage infrastructure.\n\n\u201cBetter and more resilient supply chains.\n\n\u201cAdvances in national defense.\n\n\u201cThe list goes on.\n\n\u201cBut as with any sophisticated technology, this next generation of AI presents risks as well.\n\n\u201cAnd those risks are heightened by the enormous capabilities of AI and the potential for this technology to pervade every corner of our society.\n\n\u201cAnd our goal needs to be encouraging the promise of AI while putting safeguards in place to minimize potential dangers.\n\n\u201cThe light-touch approach the United States has taken to internet regulation is a good model to follow as we approach AI regulation.\n\n\u201cThe explosive growth of internet innovation in the United States is in large part a result of the fact that the government has not weighed down this sector of the economy with heavy-handed regulation.\n\n\u201cAnd we should maintain a similarly light touch when it comes to AI to encourage innovation and keep the United States at the forefront of the next generation of artificial intelligence.\n\n\u201cLeadership in AI will benefit our economy.\n\n\u201cAnd there are also serious security reasons why staying at the forefront of the AI revolution is important.\n\n\u201cThere is no question that AI will come to play an important role in national defense, and falling behind adversaries \u2013 like the Chinese Communist Party \u2013 in this area could put our country at a serious disadvantage when it comes to our national security.\n\n\u201cSo we need to start establishing some basic rules of the road that will allow AI innovation to flourish while at the same time minimizing the dangers it presents.\n\n\u201cMr. President, the race to regulate AI has already started.\n\n\u201cPresident Biden has released a sweeping executive order that empowers multiple government agencies and departments to regulate all AI systems, and even the algorithms that recommend our next movie on Netflix or remind us that we need to order more paper towels.\n\n\u201cAnd internationally, the European Union has continued to press forward with a heavy-handed regulatory regime.\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s time for Congress to ensure innovation in the United States continues.\n\n\u201cRegulating AI by executive order is not the way to go about things.\n\n\u201cEven if the president\u2019s executive order on AI weren\u2019t overly broad and heavy-handed, executive orders are by their very nature not permanent, since they have the potential to be reversed or amended at any time \u2013 and stand a good chance of being reversed or amended when a new administration comes into office.\n\n\u201cThis creates uncertainty for companies, which can stunt expansion and innovation.\n\n\u201cThe right way to approach AI regulation is to pursue a bipartisan, nationwide approach in Congress that will protect innovation while putting in place the necessary safeguards for the riskiest applications of this technology.\n\n\u201cTo that end, shortly before Thanksgiving I introduced bipartisan AI legislation with Senator Klobuchar and several of our Commerce Committee colleagues from both parties.\n\n\u201cOur bill is intended to establish some basic rules of the road for artificial intelligence while protecting the ability of companies to innovate and advance this technology.\n\n\u201cOur bill focuses on two things \u2013 transparency for consumers, and a tiered, risk-based framework for oversight of the highest-impact applications of AI.\n\n\u201cOn the transparency front, our bill would require any large-scale internet platform that uses generative AI to create content to clearly inform consumers of that fact.\n\n\u201cOne of the risks presented by generative AI is the difficulty of distinguishing AI-produced content from human-produced content.\n\n\u201cThat may not be a huge issue if the content we\u2019re talking about is an amusing meme, but it\u2019s a real issue if a consumer is trying to figure out whether information or an image is real or whether it\u2019s been generated by AI.\n\n\u201cSo requiring transparency about whether content is being produced \u2013 or partially produced \u2013 by generative AI needs to be a priority.\n\n\u201cThe second part of our bill deals with high-impact and critical-impact AI \u2013 that is, AI applications used to make significant decisions in particularly high-risk sectors.\n\n\u201cOur bill establishes a two-tiered system for overseeing these applications.\n\n\u201cCritical-impact AI applications \u2013 for example, like those used to make significant decisions in the operation of critical infrastructure \u2013 would be required to self-certify compliance with testing, evaluation, validation, and verification standards.\n\n\u201cHigh-impact AI applications would be subject solely to transparency reporting requirements.\n\n\u201cImportantly, this part of the bill is carefully tailored to apply only to AI applications making complex decisions in high-risk sectors, and is meant to respond directly and narrowly to the recent leap in capabilities of foundation models that power them.\n\n\u201cMr. President, I believe that the bill Senator Klobuchar and I have introduced is the right first step when it comes to AI technology.\n\n\u201cUnlike the White House\u2019s executive order, our bill doesn\u2019t instantly assume that artificial intelligence technology is bad and that it should be subject to heavy-handed government intervention.\n\n\u201cNor does our legislation rush us into regulations before we have a clear idea of what aspects of this technology need to be regulated and in what way.\n\n\u201cInstead, our bill puts in place guardrails to mitigate the dangers posed by the highest-impact AI applications, while leaving American innovators and entrepreneurs free to move forward with innovation.\n\n\u201cI am grateful to Senator Klobuchar and our other co-sponsors for working with me on this bill, and we will continue to welcome ideas to further improve our legislation.\n\n\u201cLegislation on an issue of this magnitude calls for the deliberation of the committee process and regular order consideration, and I will work to ensure that we take it up in the Commerce Committee in the coming months.\n\n\u201cThis bill will not be the last bill that Congress needs to consider when it comes to AI, but I believe it is the right place for us to begin.\n\n\u201cAnd I look forward to working with colleagues from both parties to get this bill through Congress and across the finish line.\n\n\u201cMr. President, I yield the floor.\u201d", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T18:49:58Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.thune.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=BA4FB0B1-4269-4C9B-923C-263A44217D94"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 1.6235429793596268, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}