“I want the Senate to pass this bill on artificial intelligence. As a father and a former national security official, I worry about how this technology will affect our kids and our safety. We do not have all the answers, but we cannot wait. We must take this first step and act quickly.”

“Madam President, I want to thank my colleagues Senator Warner and Senator Schatz for working with me and working on this project going forward. I actually find this experience here being on the Senate floor right now really important because we are here because this is what the American people want. The American people want their elected leaders to be focused on the concerns and the threats that they worry about, that keep them up at night. As mentioned by my colleague from Hawaii, I come to this Chamber as somebody who served in national security, someone who served under both Republican and Democratic Presidents, in war zones in Afghanistan to the Situation Room at the White House. This path of mine started just a little over 25 years ago when I saw from my own home State of New Jersey the threats that we faced on national security because of September 11. I was not someone who thought I was going into national security until that day, but by 6 p.m. on September 11, I said that I am going to do and dedicate the rest of my life to doing everything I can to try to keep this country safe. Yes, that led to a lot of work in war zones and on counterterrorism, but it was always about this broader goal of, how do we ensure that safety? I come at this now not just as someone who is concerned about national security but as a father of two little boys, one of whom just celebrated his 11th birthday yesterday. And as excited as I am about seeing these two little boys grow up, I will be honest with you, I worry about what kind of world they are growing up in, the level of anxiety that I have as I see the type of technology that will define their generation. It will define not just their jobs and their education but so much about their security. So I think about them because it is not just us here in this Chamber; we are here because we are trying to answer the call of the American people. I just did a townhall the other week. Overwhelmingly, people are calling upon us, saying that they want urgency; they want this Chamber to move with the speed of urgency that they feel. So what I appreciate here is that we are engaged in this effort right now to do one simple thing, which is meet the moment. That has a lot of implications, but one is just the fact that no Senator in this Chamber is going to have all the answers. There is not a single one of us that knows all the answers. Neither do all the tech leaders. They don’t know all the answers either. But that cannot be an excuse for inaction; that, instead, we should channel that humility and that urgency to be able to move forward and recognize we do not have time to be able to design something that will handle the entirety of all the concerns we face when it comes to AI and this technology we are concerned about but just say: Look, we need to be able to move forward, to show some progress, to show some responsiveness to the concerns raised by the American people. I think this legislation is that effort to try to come up with tangible things that will move the needle. It is not going to solve all the problems, but that is the point. It is about trying to build up that muscle memory in this Chamber that we need to find. It is a muscle memory that this Chamber has found in the past when it has confronted different national security challenges in the past. We need to find that yet again at a time of great division in this country but setting it aside for us to be able to, again, meet this moment. So I am just grateful, again, for the leadership of Senator Warner, Senator Schatz, and other Senators that we are engaged with. This is an invitation to others to join this effort to stand up and say: Let’s get something done. Let’s not get totally bogged down in just the divisions that we see stalling progress on so many other fronts. The American people are demanding of us to act. Now is our time.”

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“Artificial intelligence is advancing quickly and is already used in our military. Flawed AI almost caused us to mistakenly bomb a Chinese ship. We need basic safety rules, required testing, and a government panel to check AI tools before they are used.”

“Madam President, I will wrap it up here. I have been in Virginia talking about this for a while. We have a lot of data centers, which is of some concern. But, boy oh boy, there was a seismic change starting as the companies themselves started to say: Holy heck. And just think about that. Mythos came out in March. National security and others said: This is going to change warfare. The OpenAI Hugging Face incident happened in July. That was 3,000 agents working together. In August, OpenAI got 10,000 agents to work together. It was on a different problem; they solved a math problem. But the idea is that there is kind of an exponential increase in sophistication, as these agents work together to cover their tracks, that, as Senator Schatz said, potentially could move beyond human control. If we just say ``Well, that is still hypothetical,’’ let me give you two last comments. Just today, we found that actually a model had already been released from OpenAI that attacked the Australian healthcare system. If it attacked our system, I think we would be pretty upset. Even more compelling--some of us have written a letter to both the folks on the intel side and on the defense side--there was a ship from China sailing towards the Middle East, and we got very close to bombing that ship because the AI tool and the intel said there might be weapons on that. Thank goodness that at some point, somebody did a little more checking, and we didn’t do that, but we were close to a geopolitical event that could have been catastrophic. These tools are already built into our systems, and clearly, you know, the way our military executed on Maduro--you may not agree with the greatness of it, but it was brilliant. But we don’t have safety protocols. So we are not asking for the world. Let’s do the testing early. Let’s make sure that you have a safety standard in all of these companies. Let’s make sure we do the sandbox right, report on the incident. We could discuss, you know, who is on that panel. It needs to be mandatory. It needs to have government. It needs to have national security. And Lord knows we need to have researchers, scientists. All of these individuals are asking for this. Who are we to turn that down? I am going to go back to where we started. This will be the most significant technology innovation in our lifetimes. It will make wireless and the internet and the cloud small in comparison. There could be enormous positives coming out of this. There are also going to be disruptions. But if we don’t do this in a safe manner, then shame on us. Again, I come back. You wouldn’t climb on an airplane that hadn’t been checked. We are just saying let’s do those basic safety checks. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.”

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“Both parties need to work together quickly to pass protections for new technology. If an accident happens and we have done nothing to protect our country, we will regret it.”

“Madam President, I wanted to add one last thing. I want to acknowledge the great work that Senator Klobuchar and Leader Thune are doing on this and Senator Cantwell and Senator Cruz. There are a number of other Republican Members. This has a sense of urgency. We need to come together. We could put everybody’s name on it. But history will not judge us well if, God forbid, we have an incident and we put no protections in place, for our country and for this innovation. With that, I yield the floor.”