Tech, AI Company Chiefs Urge Senators to Tone Down Regulations

Lisa Su Photographer: Annabelle Chih/Bloomberg Photo by Annabelle Chih /Bloomberg

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(Bloomberg) — The leaders of some of the biggest technology and artificial intelligence companies will go to Congress on Thursday with a wish list of sorts that at its top has doing away with regulation they say inhibits their firms’ growth and by default, sends business to China.

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“The United States needs a smart export control strategy that protects our national security, while assuring other countries that they will have reliable and sustained access to critical American AI components and services,” Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft Corp, plans to testify, according to his prepared remarks.

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Smith, along with OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, Lisa Su, the chair and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices Inc., and Michael Intrator, co-founder and chief executive officer of CoreWeave Inc., will appear before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation to advocate for government support on winning the global AI race.

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The lengthy list of industry requests includes bolstering federal AI research and development, improving workforce skills, expanding access to public data for developers and modernizing the electric grid to help deliver power to AI data centers more efficiently.  

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“As AI systems become more capable, people will want to use them even more. Meeting that demand requires more chips, training data, energy and supercomputers,” Altman plans to say, according to his prepared testimony. “Infrastructure is destiny, and we need a lot more of it.”

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It has been about two years since Altman first testified before Congress, six months after the introduction of ChatGPT rocked the world. At the time, Altman struck a markedly different tone, urging lawmakers to establish guardrails on the technology to protect users from potential harm.

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The Biden administration followed with policies such as safety testing requirements of the most advanced AI systems. Now, the Silicon Valley chiefs are calling on Congress to do away with a lot of that regulation.

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Smith in his testimony plans to repeat the widely held concern among technology executives that restrictions on shipping American AI chips to some countries would force foreign companies to turn to alternatives from China.

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Those restrictions may soon change. The Trump administration plans to rescind Biden-era AI chip curbs as part of a broader effort to revise semiconductor trade restrictions that have drawn strong opposition from major tech companies and foreign governments, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday. The Trump administration will not enforce the so-called AI diffusion rule when it takes effect on May 15, people familiar with the matter said. 

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Along with concerns over the diffusion rule, the executives laid out the inhibitive cost of building infrastructure and capacity to compete against other countries. 

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“The potential for a fragmented regulatory framework, with differing requirements from state to state and potentially at the federal level, poses a unique challenge,” Intrator plans to say, according to his prepared remarks.