Mark R. Warner

Madam President, Claims · 496 wordsI think we would all probably agree that we are living through in realtime the biggest technological transformation in generations. I was lucky enough to be involved in the beginnings of the wireless industry. As an investor, I invested in companies in the internet. As significant as both of those are, they pale in comparison to what we are facing now with this transformation, and there is a lot of good that will come out of artificial intelligence. We all know that AI is already changing the way Americans work, the way businesses compete, the way scientists conduct our research, Unearned certaintyand, frankly, as to what our government should do to protect our country. Let me be clear at the outset, America has got to continue to lead this transformation. I am down, today, with two of my colleagues--the Senator from Hawaii and the Senator from New Jersey--to say that we can’t dawdle at this moment. Each of us has got a whole series of AI legislative items. I have got ideas about data centers, about kids’ safety, about liability for AI agents, national security. Senator Rounds and I, for example, today, talked about a workforce transformation. But we have been at a moment in time, over the last few weeks, where the AI companies themselves have acknowledged that they are creating tools and entities that they may not even be able to control. We have seen one company, OpenAI, launch a series of 3,000 AI agents that jumped over the security barriers, attacked a different company, Hugging Face, came back and tried to attack their own company--these AI agents together.¹ The remarkable thing is, these 3,000 agents talked to each other, communicated, tried to hide from humans, and literally left little bits of code on their paths so that subsequent groups of AI agents might come and discover those. I have met, over the last couple of weeks, with business leaders from finance and from across corporate America who all say: What are you guys doing? This is the issue of our time. Yes, I have got frustrations on data centers, but this is the issue of our time. This is going to be the biggest transformation of our lifetimes, and we don’t have even de minimis safety protocols. We are completely relying on the good will of these large AI frontier tech companies to kind of do the right thing. That is irresponsible. You know, I am proud of the role I play in the national security domain. I have been chair or vice chair of the Intel Committee for the last decade.² Another company--not OpenAI. That was the Hugging Face incident. Anthropic created a new model called Mythos, ³and our head of cyber security--CYBERCOM--and the National Security Agency, General Rudd, said, basically, that Mythos is going to change warfare almost as much as drones.⁴ Luckily, we got a first look at that but only because the one company was willing to give that forward. The ask · 21 wordsSo we ought to have a time to have a fulsome debate about data centers, kids’ safety, liability, and other issues, Claims · 44 wordsbut right now--and we were going to do this today, but we are going to come back on Monday because the Senate has left. We are, kind of, the three of us--and we are talking to other colleagues on both sides of the aisle--saying: Promise · 8 wordsLet’s strip back all of our personal ideas, Claims · 142 wordsand let’s just put a marker down that potentially we could act on because we hear from some of the technology leaders that we might lose, you know, the ability to control some of these tools not in years or months, but some folks say--and I am not fully believing them--in weeks. I don’t believe--I am not a ``doomer’’ on AI--I don’t think the robots are going to take over the world--but I do think, if we had an event where an AI tool went out and took over a hospital or took over a water system or shut down a power system--and Americans are already concerned about the rate of this technology change--they could shut down this innovation, and that would be the worst for our country. We need to lead this in terms of some of our competitors like China. Promise · 122 wordsSo what we are going to be proposing is, I think, as simple as possible. Before any AI model coming out of these frontier labs is released to the public, it ought to be tested to make sure it is safe. A lot of these big companies also do some self-testing, but they do it in what is called a sandbox, where they are supposed to protect it. Well, we have seen that some of these sandboxes are pretty sloppy. We ought to create basic cyber security standards for that sandbox. When you start at the very beginning of how an AI model is developed, we ought to make sure that company has some basic safety protocol in place. Then, God forbid, Reasoning · 50 wordsif there is an incident, there ought to be an incident reporting so we know what is happening because the difference is, in past innovation, you could have a mistake, but it might--the amount of damage that could happen would be fairly limited. Potentially, this could be so much greater, Claims · 11 wordsand we literally are having the companies themselves say: Help us. Promise · 37 wordsNow, Lord knows we have got to make sure this is not an effort to simply ensconce the four or five biggest companies. We have got to make sure smaller tech--VC--has a place on this safety panel, Claims · 10 wordsbut we need national security. We need our top scientists. Promise · 25 wordsWe propose NIST. We are open on how to do it better, but it needs to be a public-private relationship that has a safety board. Reasoning · 63 wordsWe wouldn’t climb on an airplane or you wouldn’t get in a car or you wouldn’t get a new financial product without some regulatory oversight. With something that is as big as this, we should not miss the moment. God forbid, you know, we go away for our campaign season, and in the interim, something happens, and we have no safety in place. Claims · 20 wordsI spent a career in technology before I got involved in politics, but I never felt a moment like this. The ask · 7 wordsSo I hope that we will act. Procedure · 13 wordsWith that, Madam President, I yield the floor to my friend from Hawaii.Procedure