Around the time Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-Rhode Island) arrived in Congress several years ago, he asked outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi what she hoped to accomplish after she left leadership. “She said that the most important issue that we were going to face as a Congress was AI, and that she wanted to spend some of her remaining time in Congress really focusing on that,” Magaziner told me recently. “To hear, in 2023, Speaker Pelosi saying that this was the number one issue on her mind, was, I think, when I first realized that this was not just an important issue, but one of the most important.”
Back then, conversations about AI were a rare bipartisan bright spot in an otherwise bitterly divided Congress, and the tech industry, Magaziner recalls, was viewed as relatively helpful. Most significantly, Democrats and Republicans worked together to put forth ideas for regulating AI. In 2024, Republican and Democratic House leaders appointed a bipartisan AI task force — 12 Republicans, 12 Democrats — which, at the end of the year, released a 253-page document containing 85 recommendations. “All 24 of us co-sponsored” those ideas, and “there was a real bipartisan push to do something,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Virginia) told me recently, noting that “it was a really fun experience.”
Fast forward several years. Interest in AI has exploded in the country as a whole, and there has been no shortage of AI-related efforts in Congress. A few have even passed — most prominently the Take It Down Act, which blocks publication of nonconsensual intimate images, including those generated by AI. And just last week, two House members — a Republican and a Democrat — introduced a bill that would establish some national safety guidelines for AI while also preempting states’ ability to regulate AI developers.