Press Releases

Rep. Don Beyer, vice-chair of the bipartisan Congressional AI Caucus and a member of Speaker McCarthy’s bipartisan working group on artificial intelligence, issued the following statement today after the White House announced new voluntary commitments to adopt safety standards in AI development from seven leading tech firms:

“Today’s announcement by President Biden of an agreement to establish industry standards in AI development is a helpful step forward on AI in the short term. In the long term, history has shown we will need more than voluntary commitments from industry leaders.

“I am working with members of both parties, including the bipartisan leaders on the AI Caucus and Speaker McCarthy’s working group, to develop real, practicable ideas that will put guardrails in place for AI. My legislative discussions with colleagues have covered a variety of areas related to AI, including safety and security, transparency, the future of work, preventing civil rights abuses, health care and suicide prevention, and more.

“As the national focus on AI moves from large language models to aspects which affect other areas of our lives, it will become increasingly important that Congress get up to speed and begin considering legislation on the issue. This is a key work in progress, and a major focus for me this Congress.”

The White House agreement announced today featured voluntary commitments from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI to voluntarily adopt new security and transparency standards in the development of AI platforms, including security testing, information sharing, establishing cybersecurity and other safeguards including watermarks, pursuing safety research, and more.

Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA) is Vice Chair of the bipartisan Congressional Artificial Intelligence Caucus, and a member of Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy’s bipartisan working group on AI. He previously served for eight years on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. He is currently attending George Mason University as a part time student completing coursework towards the pursuit of a master’s degree in machine learning, in part to help inform his work on AI in Congress.