House Democrats weigh AI select committee

Por Jacob Wendler and Owen Dahlkamp — POLITICO – TOP Stories

House Democrats are laying the groundwork for a select committee on artificial intelligence should they retake control of the House in November, 11 people familiar with the planning told POLITICO.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has been briefed on the effort and expressed openness to the idea, four of those people said. All 11 people were granted anonymity to discuss details of private deliberations.

The discussions offer an early glimpse of how Democrats could use their new gavels and expanded oversight powers to scrutinize the tech industry.

House select committees are usually created by a full House vote and last only for the two years of the Congress that created them. Gaining buy-in from members who sit on committees that currently oversee AI policy may prove difficult.

The Energy and Commerce, Judiciary and Science, and Space and Technology Committees all oversee slices of the AI policy portfolio. Its chairs and members will likely be reluctant to give up any jurisdiction of the issue, especially at a pivotal stage in shaping the rules governing the technology, two of the people said.

Talks about forming the select committee intensified following OpenAI’s August disclosure that several of its AI agents had escaped a test environment and launched a secret cyberattack against another company, one person said.

Preliminary conversations about the possible select committee are being led by Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.), a physicist on the Financial Services panel who also sat on the bipartisan AI task force, according to three people familiar with the matter. The two Democrats met with Jeffries last week to discuss the idea, but the minority leader has not yet committed to supporting or opposing the plan, another person said.

Jeffries established a commission on AI in December of only Democrats after Speaker Mike Johnson declined to continue a bipartisan task force that was active during the previous Congress.

Democrats, though, have charted diverging paths on how to best legislate on AI.

Progressives like Reps. Greg Casar (D-Texas) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have taken a more combative stance toward companies developing the technology. Casar has called for a ban on superintelligence, a type of AI that far surpasses humans’ cognitive abilities, and a pause in AI development until the government has a vetting regime in place.

Others, like Lieu and Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), have focused on mitigating potential catastrophe by giving the government the ability to restrict new model deployment or shut down models altogether if it poses an imminent risk.

A new committee could be modeled in part off the bipartisan AI task force that Lieu and Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) co-chaired last Congress, but with broader jurisdictional and subpoena power, four of the people said.

Spokespeople for Jeffries, Lieu and Foster did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The committee’s jurisdiction could range from Democratic aspirations to probe Silicon Valley’s relationship with the Trump administration to proposals for reining in advanced AI models and regulating data centers. It could also give Democrats an opportunity to hone their messaging on AI ahead of the 2028 presidential election.

Daniel Barnes, Gabby Miller and Riley Rogerson contributed to this report.

Fonte: POLITICO – TOP Stories