Good morning. The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation is called to order. Welcome to our witnesses. Thank you for joining us this morning.

In the last two years, AI has brought the United States and the world to a critical inflection point. AI may be a technology as transformative as the internet or even more so. It has unleashed a new global industrial revolution with the potential to unlock opportunities that improve our quality of life, create jobs, and stimulate economic growth. The country that leads in AI will shape the 21st century global order. As a matter of economic security, as a matter of national security, America has to beat China in the AI race. China has made AI central to its national strategy. And China aims to lead the world in AI by 2030, investing heavily in AI adoption across industries like manufacturing and defense.

In this race, the United States is facing a fork in the road. Do we go down the path that embraces our history of entrepreneurial freedom and technological innovation, or do we adopt the command and control policies of Europe? I would suggest that Congress draw on the lessons we can learn from the dawn of the internet.

In the early 1990s, Washington embraced the internet and explicitly adopted a style of regulation that was intentionally and decisively light touch. Congress chose to deregulate under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, while President Clinton pursued tariff agreements and treaties that protected America's intellectual property and technological exports. Further, in 1998, Congress enacted a 10-year internet tax moratorium so that state laws wouldn't balkanize and stymy the promise of e-commerce.

The results of these decisions were extraordinary. I made a lot of money. By 2000, the United States had recorded five straight years of historic highs in productivity gains and investment growth. Hundreds of thousands of new jobs were created, and the United States became a top tech exporter with massive sums of private investment pouring into the US digital economy. By contrast, EU countries pursued a series of heavy-handed regulations that proved enormously costly. In 1993, the United States and Europe had economies virtually identical in size. Today, the American economy is more than 50% larger than Europe's. The drivers of that are tech and the shale revolution. Those two comprise virtually the entirety of that massive growth over Europe. According to one EU Commission report, only 6% of global AI startup funding flows to EU firms. 6%. That is one-tenth of the amount that is going to American companies. The report directly blames this yawning chasm on the EU's nasty regulatory approach.

And yet, the Biden administration, for inexplicable reasons, tried to align AI policy with the EU to adopt their failed policies. President Biden's sweeping AI executive order, the longest executive order in American history, cast AI as dangerous and opaque, laying the groundwork for audits, for risk assessments, and regulatory certifications. Biden's approach inspired similar efforts in state legislatures across the country, threatening to burden startups, developers, and AI users with heavy compliance costs.

Some of my colleagues suggest that a friendlier version of the Biden approach makes sense. They want a testing regime to guard against AI "discrimination" and have government agencies provide "guidance documents"—seemingly something out of Orwell—that will usher in what they call "best practices," as if AI engineers lack the intelligence to responsibly build AI without the bureaucrats. Many in the industry foolishly have supported such paternalism.

Harmful regulations take many forms. Biden's misguided midnight AI diffusion rule on chips and model weights would have crippled American tech companies' ability to sell AI to the world. The Biden plan would have handed over key markets to China. We should want foreign countries, particularly our allies, to buy American. I vocally opposed this rule for months, and indeed the ranking member and I together urged the Biden administration not to adopt it, and I'm very pleased that President Trump has now confirmed he plans to rescind it.

All of this busybody bureaucracy, whether Biden's industrial policy on chip exports or industry and regulator-approved guidance documents, is a wolf in sheep's clothing. To lead in AI, the United States cannot allow regulation, even the supposedly benign kind, to choke innovation or adoption. American dominance in AI depends on two factors: innovation and adoption. Innovation drives breakthroughs in global competitiveness. Adoption ensures that these tools empower American workers and businesses, enabling the United States to become the world's leading adopter and exporter of AI.

Thankfully, President Trump has largely reversed Biden's misguided AI agenda. In fact, I think AI was a sleeper issue in this last election. Americans wanted to see President Trump and Republicans—and indeed all senators—champion AI policies focused on innovation and adoption. The contrast has been astounding. This year, there have been over $1 trillion of new AI projects, including major investments in Texas, like the CoreWeave data center in Plano and the $500 billion project Stargate in Abilene by OpenAI and Oracle and others.

Adopting a light-touch regulatory style for AI will require Congress to work alongside the president, just as Congress did with President Clinton. We need to advance legislation that promotes long-term AI growth and innovation. That's why I will soon release a new bill that creates a regulatory sandbox for AI, modeled on the approach taken by Congress and President Clinton at the dawn of the internet, that will remove barriers to AI adoption, prevent needless state overregulation, and allow the AI supply chain to rapidly grow here in the United States. That's how we'll accelerate economic growth, secure US dominance in AI, and beat China.

And with that, I turn to the ranking member, Campwell.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Uh, thank you for this hearing, and welcome to the witnesses before us, Mr. Altman, Dr. Sue, Mr. Integrator, and Mr. Smith. It's a great pleasure to have all of you here, but it's especially a prideful moment for the Pacific Northwest to have Mr. Smith and Mr. Altman here, both representing an open AI approach. By that, I mean an approach where we want to win against China and a closed system by making sure that what is developed here in the United States and around the globe is an architecture where the United States wins and is open.

To do that, we need to focus on winning on computing power, on algorithms, and on robust data sources. All of that will be key. Personally, I believe a continued investment in NSF helps in all of those areas as a good public-private partnership with the industry that's represented here today. I'm so proud that we passed the Chips and Science Act because the Chips and Science Act also set a foundation for investing in the United States of America and bringing more of the supply chain back to the United States of America to build on a future leadership that we already have, I believe, in the computing power. But we also need to understand that we have to move forward on the Chips Act like the University of Washington's $10 million grant on multi-design sets for chips, the very large-scale integrated designs. I'm sure that Dr. Sue will tell us about today. But the fact that the United States has to continue to lead on the future designs and the implementation of that also requires us to be very smart about data centers, about sources of electricity, and how we're going to build that supply that could be up to 12% of electricity demand in the very near future.

So, how do we do that? I've noticed in each of your testimonies, you all explained this, but I'm also very proud that Microsoft has already signed an agreement with one company, Fusion Energy, in Everett, Washington, for a power source supply. Maybe Mr. Altman in his testimony will talk about this, but that they hope to get a very near-future energy source from that. So clearly, the United States leading on electricity and development. So, Mr. Smith, very much appreciate in your testimony the accentuation on the fact that the United States of America needs hundreds of thousands of new electricians. Something we should all want to get behind. The fact that having electricity and the electricians and the data source centers here in the United States and in other places will be key.

While I want to see us move forward, as the chairman said, we signed a letter saying we needed a broader support for export controls. I want to be clear: export controls are not a trade strategy. They are not a backpocket issue that the president of the United States whips out in trade negotiations. We are going to move fast because we are going to set standards. I believe those standards should be encouraging very broad distribution of US-manufactured and made AI chips and technology and that we're asking our partners overseas to comply with the rules that we establish. Things like making sure that there is no circumvention of the supply that somehow gets into China's hands, making sure that we have access and making sure that we can verify on that, and also making sure that US data companies and cloud-based companies are allowed to be in that market. We should not be going to markets overseas only to have them tell us that organizations with cloud services from the US would not be allowed. This, I believe, would be a robust initiative on getting US AI chips and US AI open systems dominated around the globe.

Why do we need to move fast? We need to move fast because if we don't, we are looking at another Huawei, another instance where the United States is behind and also saying we should tear out this system that now we don't like for lots of reasons and backdoor policies. So, I'm all for winning. That is why we passed the Chips and Science Act. I'm all for winning, and that is why we have passed seven bills out of this committee last year that kind of got stuck in the lame duck. I think the chairman of the committee wasn't ready to move forward in negotiations with the House and Senate on those seven bills. But those bills, a bill between myself and Senator Young on the Institute for standards, NIST standards, which I think we still need to do; my colleague and I, Moran, on education and scholarships, small business; and the bill by my colleague here, Senators Klobuchar and Thune, which was also related to the NIST standards. So, we had an opportunity a year ago to move fast; we didn't do it. So, let's do this now. Let's get together and figure this out. The faster the United States moves now—I like this great Paul Romer quote which was about collaboration is the next phase of innovation—if we don't collaborate here, if we throw down on politics instead of getting the policy right, we won't move fast. Let's allow these people to do what they do best and let's make sure the United States has the right policies in place so that our open AI standard wins the day.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you. Uh, I'd now like to introduce our witnesses for today. Each of our witnesses and their companies represent critical parts of the AI infrastructure, hardware, and software supply chain. Our first witness is Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. OpenAI is one of the world's most advanced AI companies, known best for its ChatGPT product. Our second witness is Lisa Sue, the chair and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). AMD develops high-performance processors, graphic chips, and AI accelerators that power artificial intelligence. And Dr. Sue is also a Texan. Our third witness today is Michael Andreatta, the CEO and co-founder of CoreWeave, an AI hyperscaler. CoreWeave is the world's largest purpose-built AI cloud platform. And our final witness is Brad Smith, the vice chair and president of Microsoft. I believe everyone is familiar with his company. Uh, Mr. Altman, you are recognized for your opening statement. If you could turn on the volume.

Sorry about that. And and I do enjoy telling techies how to operate the tech. Pretty embarrassing that I couldn't figure that out. Anyway, thank you, Chairman. Thank you, Ranking Member Campwell. Thank you, all senators and fellow panelists. Uh, it's a real honor to be here. I was here about two years ago, and at that time, ChatGPT had recently launched. It was a curiosity in the world. People weren't sure what it was going to mean, what it was going to be used for. Um, today, uh, we've we've made significant progress. ChatGPT is used by more than 500 million people a week. Uh, I just saw yesterday that it, according to SimilarWeb, it's now the fifth biggest website on the internet globally. Um, growing very quickly, but most of all, it's being used in really important ways. It's significantly increasing productivity. We hear scientists say they're two or three times more productive than they could be before. We hear people—they're getting uh medical advice or learning in ways they couldn't before. And it's really—it's it's no longer this thing that was going to come uh in the future, but it's a—it's here now and people are really using it.

We're very proud um to be one of the leaders of this. We're very proud that America is leading in AI uh so significantly, and I think that's critical—what uh Senator Cruz said about the importance of innovation in America and that we have the—what happened with the internet—we have happen again. I believe this will be at least as big as the internet, maybe bigger, um that needs to happen. For that to happen, investment in infrastructure is critical. I believe the next decade will be about abundant intelligence and abundant energy. Um, making sure that those—that America leads in both of those—that we are able to usher in these dual revolutions that will change the world we live in, I think, in incredibly positive ways—is critical.

I got to go to Abilene, Texas, yesterday, uh where we're building out what will be the largest AI training facility in the world. It's coming along beautifully. Uh, super exciting to see. We need a lot more of that. There's a whole sort of AI factory, like a supply chain of energy, chips, standing up data centers, building the racks, and more. We've got to do that really well in the US so that we can continue to innovate, continue to lead, um, and continue to sort of shape this revolution.

Speaking of that, um, I was very inspired by what Chairman Cruz said. So, I'd like to deviate from script here and tell a story. In my prepared written testimony, I covered the basics. Um, so if it's okay, I'd love to tell you a story. Uh, I I grew up in St. Louis, and I was a computer nerd, and it was the time of the internet boom, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Um, we kind of lived in this beautiful old brick house in this uh suburb of St. Louis, and I lived in the attic, and I had this computer, and I would stay up all night, and I would learn to program, and I got to kind of use the internet, and it was like a crazy time of tons of innovation. All sorts of stuff was happening. Um, it was amazing, and it was all happening here. All the internet companies were in the US. I used a Mac that was built here. I used chips that were started, you know, near where I now live. Uh, and I learned about computers. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. And I can draw a straight line from that experience to founding OpenAI and getting to work on companies like Elon. The spirit of American innovation and um supportive entrepreneurship. I I don't think the internet could have happened anywhere else. And if that didn't happen, I don't think the AI revolution would have happened here. Um, I I am a child of the internet revolution. I have the great honor to be one of the parents—of the many parents—of the AI revolution. And I think it is no accident that that's happening in America again and again and again. But we need to make sure that we build our systems and that we set our policy in a way where that continues to happen. Um, I think this is magic. I don't want to live in Europe either. Uh, I think America is just an incredible and special thing, and it will not only be the place where the AI revolution happens, but all the revolutions after.

I was home visiting St. Louis recently, drove by our old house, and I kind of like was at night, and I looked up, and in that like top floor window, the light was on, and I thought, you know, hopefully there's some kid in there staying up late at night playing with ChatGPT, figuring out how he or she is going to start whatever company comes next, and whatever the next thing is after—I will happen here too. Um, that is—that is to me the magic of this country. It's incredibly personally important, and I hope it keeps going. Thank you very much for having me.

Thank you. Dr. Sue.

Chairman Cruz, Ranking Member Cantwell, members of the committee. It is a real honor to be here on such an important topic. I am chair and CEO of AMD. We are a US-headquartered semiconductor company founded 56 years ago, and we build high-performance computing chips for the modern economy. Every day, billions of people rely on our products and services powered by our technologies. But our chips are also extremely important to support critical missions, including powering defense systems and secure communications as well as enabling breakthrough scientific research. Um, I have to say our proudest moments though are when we see amazing public-private partnerships, and our work in supercomputing is an example of that. Through more than a decade of partnership with the Department of Energy, AMD now powers the two fastest supercomputers in the world. One uh that is housed at Oak Ridge National Labs that was put into place in 2021, and the other um at Lawrence Livermore National Labs that was just recently uh put into commission uh late last year. These systems are really critical from a national infrastructure standpoint and solve uh many, many um large research issues as well as national um security and scientific leadership.

Now, in terms of AI, you know, there's so much that's been stated about AI. Um, I really want to thank um Chairman Cruz and Ranking Member Cantwell for having this hearing. I think it is a wonderful opportunity to talk about how we win. Um, AI is truly the most transformative technology of our time. The United States leads today. But what I would like to say is it is a race. Leadership is absolutely not guaranteed. Uh, it's a global race that will shape the outcome of national security and economic prosperity for many decades to come. Now, maintaining our lead actually requires excellence at every layer of the stack. So I'm really honored to be here with my panelists as well. We have deep partnerships with Microsoft and OpenAI that demonstrate how you need silicon, you need software, you need systems, and uh really the application layer to be successful.

Now, in terms of what to do, I thought about what would be the most important things to say today, and I put them in, you know, five categories. Um, I think the first and probably the foremost is we must continue to run faster. Uh, this is a race, and the race does not stand still. Nobody in the world stands still. uh, we lead today because of the bold decisions that we've made and because of the innovation uh economy that we have, but we need to continue to run faster, and that means ensuring that we have computing available. I think Sam's story about Abilene is an excellent example of how when you allow uh the uh computing infrastructure to expand at the rate and pace that um the private sector wants, you actually make a tremendous progress. I would also like to mention the importance of open ecosystems. I think open ecosystems are really a cornerstone of US leadership and that allows um, you know, frankly, ideas to come from everywhere and every part of the um innovation cycle, reducing barriers to entry and strengthening uh security as well as creating um frankly a competitive marketplace for ideas.

Um, third, you know, we are very um happy to see the focus on a robust domestic supply chain. For us in the semiconductor world, we used to not get so much attention. Now we get a lot of attention uh thanks to uh the importance of chips. And you know, the fact is we need more uh manufacturing in the US. Uh, the efforts so far have made good progress, but there's a lot more that can be done and that should be done in public uh private partnership. Um, fourth, we must invest in talent. You know, frankly, the United States should be the best place uh to study AI, to work in AI, to really uh move forward all of the innovations that we need. And I think again this can also be done in significant public-private partnership. And then fifth, of course, in the area of export controls, um, we must—we totally understand as an industry the importance of national security, and that is, you know, without that goes without saying as a US company, but we also want to ensure um, as Chairman Cruz and Ranking Member Cantwell stated, it is important to have widespread adoption of US technologies. We lead today because we have the best technology. However, if we're not able to um, you know, fully uh have our technology adopted in the rest of the world, there will be other technologies that will come to play. They may not be as good as we are today, but frankly, usage uh really spurs um innovation. And this is something that we certainly need to work with in uh public-private partnership. And I would frankly end by saying, you know, like Sam, I had a computer uh when I was growing up. Um, I grew up in New York. Um, I'm a little older than Sam. So my first computer was a Commodore 64, and then I graduated to the Apple 2. Uh, but the fact is um this is the best place to do um computing innovation in the world. We want to stay that way with uh really a very rich and broad um ecosystem. So thank you again for the opportunity uh to be here today.

And I had an Apple 2 as well, with a shoe box of floppy discs, and somehow I ended up taking a wrong turn and ending up in politics instead.

Mr. Andreatta.

I started out with a VIC-20. Um, Chairman Cruz, Ranking Member Cantwell, and distinguished members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I'm honored to appear alongside my industry colleagues and partners. Uh, my name is Michael Andreatta. I am the co-founder and CEO of CoreWeave, founded seven years ago. Uh, CoreWeave started, like many innovative ventures, humbly in a garage, experimenting initially with graphics processing units, or GPUs, for cryptocurrency mining. Uh, recognizing the transformational potential, we pivoted to support powerful AI applications, dramatically scaling the vision uh and operation. Today, CoreWeave stands at the forefront of America's AI infrastructure revolution, operating more than 30 data centers across 15 states. We manage more than 250,000 GPUs, currently using 360 megawatts of power. Uh, over two short years, our revenue has surged by 12,000%, reaching 1.9 billion in 2024. As a result of this progress, CoreWeave became a publicly traded company on March 28th of 2025. CoreWeave's rapid growth is a testimony not only to the technology but also to the surging global demand for advanced AI infrastructure. Our infrastructure enables American businesses to rapidly translate AI aspirations uh uh into impactful economic realities. By empowering companies to accelerate innovation, we're fueling America's competitive edge while improving productivity and prosperity. Modern AI requires specialized infrastructure, purpose-built computing capabilities that surpass traditional cloud computing in scale and performance. Today's general-purpose cloud that was built to support and scale the complexity of AI workloads. We cannot run a 21st-century economy on the 20th century's infrastructure. AI workloads involve trillions of simultaneous calculations, demanding unprecedented computing power, advanced cooling systems, cutting-edge chip technology, ultra-high-speeded networks, and accelerated storage. Since 2018, the computing power necessary for advanced AI models has multiplied approximately 100,000-fold. At CoreWeave, our facilities symbolize America's great tradition of innovation. Our data centers, built, maintained, and staffed by skilled American workers, embody how modern technology not only stimulates economic growth and enhances national security but also improves human lives. We are at a critical juncture in the global AI competition. The nation that leads in infrastructure will set the global economic agenda and shape human outcomes for decades. Our largest competitor, China, recognizes the stakes and is expending significant resources to strengthen their position. I want to focus on four elements of policy that will help determine whether the US secures its leadership role in the AI race. First, strategic investment stability. AI infrastructure is deeply capital intensive and requires a significant level of coordination across industry stakeholders. Stable, predictable policy frameworks, secure supply chains, and regulatory environments that foster innovation are crucial. Policymakers must provide clear and consistent policy and regulations across all jurisdictions that enable long-term investment and rapid scaling of AI technology. Second, energy infrastructure development. To support the rapid deployment of AI infrastructure, America must ensure abundant and affordable supplies of energy. Careful reforms in permitting and regulatory processes are necessary to accelerate infrastructure projects, facilitate more rapid construction, interconnections, and energy for data centers. Third is global market access. Maintaining America's leadership also means ensuring our technology has fair access to global markets. Export controls and trade agreements can be calibrated...

Smarter. Um, a lot of people use these systems all the time, and we were worried that if it was not 100, you know, 0% accurate, which is still a challenge with these systems, it would cause a bunch of problems. But users are smart. People understand, you know, what these systems are good at, when to use them, when not. And as that robustness increases, which it which it will continue to do, people will use it for more and more things. Um, but we've made, as an industry, we've made pretty remarkable progress in that direction over the last couple of years.

Well, I know we'll be watching that. Another um challenge that has been uh we've seen, and Senator Cruz worked and I worked on a bill together uh for quite a while, and that's the Take It Down Act. And that is that we are increasingly uh seeing um internet activity where kids looking for a boyfriend or girlfriend, maybe they put out a real picture of themselves; it ends up being distributed at their school, or uh they somehow they someone tries to scam them from financial gain, or it's AI, as we've increasingly seen, where it's not even someone's photos but someone puts a fake uh body on there. And we've had about over 20 suicides in one year of young people uh because they felt like their life was ruined because this was they were going to be exposed in this way. So this bill we passed um and through the Senate and the House um um the first lady supported it, and it's headed to the president's desk.

Could you talk about how we can build models that can better detect harmful deep fakes, Mr. Smith?

Yeah, I mean we're doing that. OpenAI is doing that; a number of us are, and I think the the goal is to you first identify content that is generated by AI uh and then often it is to identify what kind of content is harmful, and I think we've made a lot of strides in our ability to do both of those things. Um, there's a lot of work that's going on across the private sector and in partnership with groups like NickMC to then uh you collaboratively identify that kind of content so it can be taken down. Um, we've been doing this in some ways for 25 years since the internet, and we're going to need to do more of it.

And on the issue, last question, Mr. Chair, since the last one was about your bill, I figured it's okay. Um, the, uh, newspapers and you testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, uh, Mr. Smith, about the bill Senator Kennedy and I had, still think that there's an issue here about, uh, negotiating content rates. We've seen some action recently in Canada and other places. Um, can you talk about those evolving dynamics with AI developers and what's happening here to make sure that uh content providers and journalists get paid for their work?

Yeah, it's a complicated topic, but I'll just say a couple things. First, I think we should all want to see newspapers in some form flourish across the country, including say rural counties that increasingly have become news deserts; newspapers have disappeared. Second, and it's been the issue that we discussed in the judiciary committee, there should be an opportunity for newspapers to get together and negotiate collectively. We've supported that. That will enable them to basically do better. Um, third, every time there's new technology, there is a new generation of a copyright debate that is taking place now. Some of it will probably be decided by Congress, some by the courts. A lot of it is also being addressed through collaborative action. And we should hope for all of these things to I'll just say strike a balance. We want people to make a living creating content, and we want AI to advance by having access to data.

Okay. Thanks. I'll ask other questions on the record. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you.

You know, Senator Clolobachar asked whether AI will lead us to heaven or hell. It reminded me of a famous observation by Yale law professor Grant Gilmore that in heaven there is no law, and the lion will lie down with the lamb. In hell there is nothing but law, and due process is meticulously observed. Let me ask you this, and this is to each of the four witnesses: In the race for AI, who's winning, America or China? If the answer is America, how close is China to us? And what do we do to make sure the answer remains America will win? Mr. Alman, we'll start with you.

It is our it is our belief that the uh American models, including some models from our company, OpenAI and Google and others, are the best models in the world. It's very hard to say how far ahead we are, but I would say not a huge amount of time. Um, and I think to continue that leadership position and the influence that that comes that comes with that and the all of the incredible benefits of the world using American technology products and services, uh the things that my colleagues have spoken about here, the need to win in infrastructure, sensible regulation that does not slow us down, the sort of spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship that I think is a uniquely American thing in the world. Um, none of this is rocket science. We just need to keep doing the things that have worked for so long and and not and not make a silly mistake.

Dr. too.

Uh, I'll answer um in the uh realm of chips. I would say America is um ahead in chips today. We have the um the best AI accelerators um in the world. Uh, I think China um although they have restrictions given their ability to use advanced technologies. Uh, the one thing that's very important for us all to remember is there are multiple ways to do things. You know, having the best chips is great, but um even if you don't have the best chips, you can get a lot done. So I think this this conversation about how far behind China is, they are certainly catching up because there are many ways to do things. I think relative to what we can do, uh I will continue to say uh really ensure that our spirit of innovation is um is allowed to work and that is having um you know very supportive government policies uh to do that, having very consistent policies and allowing us to do what we do best, which is innovate at every layer of the stack.

Mr. Trader.

Uh, so I I I'll speak to it from the physical infrastructure um and software stack to deliver that. Um, America is ahead, but it is the Achilles heel from the perspective of the ability as I started to to better, sorry about that. Uh, so so the the ability to build very large solutions to the computing infrastructure component of this is uh an area that we're going to struggle with from a permitting and building large projects to be able to deliver the the power to to allow uh those building artificial intelligence to continue to move as fast as they can in in the race that we're in.

Mr. Smith.

I think the United States has a lead today in what is a close race and a race that will likely remain close. The number one factor that will define whether the United States or China wins this race is whose technology is most broadly adopted in the rest of the world. This is a global market, and it will be defined as technology markets typically are by network effects. 18% of the people in the world live in China. 4% live in the United States; 78% live somewhere else. The lesson from Huawei and 5G is whoever gets there first will be difficult to supplant. We need to export with the right kinds of controls. We need to win the trust of the rest of the world. We need to have the financial architecture that gets not only to the countries that are industrialized but the nations say across Africa where typically China and Huawei have done so well. So some of my colleagues have made reference to standards as as something that is desirable, and I will say standards is often code word for regulations, and indeed the EU stifling standards uh concerning the internet is what killed tech in Europe. Uh, we are seeing now state legislators mimicking the EU such as California's SB 1047, which thankfully was overwhelmingly defeated but would have created essentially a California DMV for AI model registration. How harmful would it be to winning the race for AI if America goes down goes down the road of the EU and creates a heavyhanded prior approval government regulatory process for AI?

I I think that would be disastrous. Um, I to give a more specific answer to your previous question which I think touches on why it would be so bad. Um, there there are three key inputs to these AI systems. There's compute, all the infrastructure we're talking about. There's algorithms that we all do research on. Um, and there's data. If you don't have any one of those, you cannot succeed in making the best models. And as Brad said, the the way for America to influence the world here is to have the technology that people most want to use and and most adopt. The world uses iPhones and Google and Microsoft products, and that's wonderful; like that's how we have our influence. We don't we don't want that to stop happening. So systems that stop us on any of these areas, you know, if we if we have if we have rules about what data we can train on that are not competitive with the rest of the world, uh then things can fall apart. If we are not able to build the infrastructure and particularly if we're not able to manufacture the chips in this country, the rules can fall apart. If we can't build the products that people want that naturally win in the market and I think people do want to use American products, we can make them the best, but if we're prevented from doing that, people will use a better product made from somebody else that doesn't have the sort of you know that is not stymied in the same way. So it is I am nervous about standards being set too early. I'm totally fine uh you know with the position some of my colleagues took that standards once the industry figures out what they should be it's fine for them to be adopted by a government body and sort of made more official, but I believe the industry is moving quickly towards figuring out the right protocols and standards here, and we need the space to innovate and to move quickly. So if each of you could briefly answer that question because my time's expired so I want to be respectful of that.

I agree with the comments of him. Um, I I agree, and I would just say and I think the point you're making is we have to be very careful not to have these pre-approval requirements including at state levels because that would really slow innovation in the country. I I I think that uh a patchwork of regulatory overlays will uh cause friction in in the ability to build and extend what we're doing.

Thank you.

Um, Senator Curtis shot. Senator Shot, sorry, apologies.

No problem, Chairman. Uh, thank you for being here. I just want to follow up on on the chairman's question and a sort of it may be an emerging consensus on the committee. Okay. I don't think there's anybody even on this side of the deis that's proposing a sort of European style pre-approval. I think there are some people who would like to do nothing at all in the regulatory space, but I think most people understand that some guard rails, those are the words that you use, uh Mr. Altman, uh rules and guard rails, uh are necessary. Um, are you saying that self-regulation is sufficient at the current moment?

No, I I think some policy is good. Um, I I think it is easy for it to go too far. And as I've learned more about how the world works, I'm more afraid that it could go too far and have really bad consequences. But people want to use products that are generally safe. You know, when you get on an airplane, you kind of don't think about doing the safety testing yourself. You're like, this is well, maybe this is a bad time to use the airplane example. But you kind of like want to just trust that you can get on. It's an excellent time to use the airplane example. Um, but but I think your your point is exactly right is that um look there is there is a race, but we need to understand what we're racing for right, and it it also has to do with American values. It's not just a sort of commercial race so we can edge out uh our near-peer competitor both in the public sector and the private sector. We're trying to win a race so that American values prevail uh internationally.

Um, Mr. Smith, I want to move on to another topic. Um, it seems to me that on the consumer side that one of the most basic rights of a user on the internet is to understand what they're looking at or listening to and whether or not it was created solely by a person, a person using an AI, or automatically generated using AI. Do you think a labeling regime, not a prohibition on the use of AI, but just the disclosure uh especially as it relates to images, music, creativity, do you think a label would be helpful for consumers?

Uh, generally yes, and I think that's what we in the industry have been working to create. I think you're right to make the distinction and focus especially on say images, video, audio files. Um, there's a standard called C2PA that we and a number of companies now have been advancing. Uh, it has content credentials. It enables people to know where something was created, who created it, and I think you're right to know whether it was created by a person, by AI, or a person with the help of say AI.

Um, I just want to use sort of common language, not the language that all of you use or that we've all learned to use. When you talk about the data as one of the three elements that makes a model work, data really is intellectual property; it is human innovation, human creativity. And I'm I I do think we we may have a disagreement, and I agree with Senator Clolobashar about the need to understand that these models have been trained on data, but what we're really talking about is human achievement all the way up to now. And I I have a deep worry. Look, I'm actually an optimist in the energy space and the public service space. Um, certainly in in health innovation. There are a lot of really exciting opportunities here. But we got to pay people for their knowledge. And I am concerned that these models are going to be so successful in spitting out what appears to be knowledge that we're gonna on the back end not pay people for all of the the inputs, and we will have a sort of stalling out of these models. And and you talked about attention, but I'm trying to figure out what the tension really is other than you'd like to pay as little as possible for these inputs. Go ahead, Mr. Smith.

Um, well, I I I you had me until the last sentence.

I know.

Hey, look, we're we create intellectual property. We respect intellectual property. So, we're emphatically of the view that intellectual property and the creation of it should be rewarded. Ultimately, intellectual property laws are always about drawing the line. It's really the line that you referred to. In copyright, there is expression that is protected. If you write a book and somebody copies it, then you are entitled to be paid. But there are ideas. If someone reads your book, if someone remembers that, you know, Shakespeare wrote a story about two teenagers who fell in love, sure, then that's fair use. Then that that's fair use. That's that's why this country created it. That's what we need to focus on.

With your permission, chairman, I want to ask one final question.

Proceed.

Thank you.

Um, I'm actually quite excited about the prospect that in 20 years people are going to say, "Remember when you had to wait on the phone uh to talk to Kaiser Permanente or the VA?" So, I I just maybe Mr. Altman and Mr. Smith, I want you to, you know, a buddy of mine used to say, "Paint a picture and paint me in it." Okay. for for the government actually delivering services. I want you to describe what an AI agent or AI can do to kind of reduce those pain points that we accept as a fact of life in interacting with the government. It seems to me so much of what makes us irritated with the government is the lack of sorting data that exists somewhere but we can't get access to it. So just very quickly uh you have 15 seconds each for some cheerleading.

I can imagine a future where the US government offers a uh AI powered service that makes it really easy to use all government services, to get great healthcare, to get great education. You have this thing in your pocket, and if you have any medical problem, you get an answer. If you need to, you know, like appeal something on some processing with the government or file your taxes or whatever, you just do it instantly. You have an agent in your uh pocket fully integrated with the United States government, and life is easy.

Anything to add?

Remember when Remember when you had to stand in line to renew your driver's license? Remember when you didn't know how to report a pothole that needed to be repaired on your street? Remember when you had a fender bender in a car and you had to fill out all these forms and talk to all these people to get insurance coverage? Now you can do it all with one AI system. You can use your phone. And by the way, you can do this today in Abu Dhabi. We need to bring it to America.

Thank you, Senator Bud.

Thank you, Chairman. Again, thank you all for being here. I've enjoyed uh various conversations with each of you. The ability for the US to deploy new energy generation capacity and upgrade its grid, it's many ways the key to the race against China. Energy is how we can win, and it's also how we can lose. Permitting in this country, it takes too long. China's command and control system means that they will not fail to deploy the energy needed to achieve the scale necessary to develop the most advanced models, which will drive all to the benefit of AI. So I'm glad to be working with Senator Lumis on the free act which would set up a permit by rule structure which would let large projects meet comprehensive standards at the front end instead of dragged out on a case-by-case process. We all want to protect the environment, and we all want to maintain US economic and technological leadership. So Mr. Entrator, uh what has Corey's experience been in contracting power, and are you concerned that the current permitting system can make it hard for the US to achieve capital investment and the scale needed to win this AI race?

So, as you said, um access to to power, access to scale power, um is certainly one of the keys to our ability to win this race. There are there are others, but it is uh uh one that I spent a lot of time thinking about. Um, the uh I separated the comment into P access to power and access to scale power because I I do think that we are moving towards a uh uh a period of this race where the size the magnitude of uh the infrastructure that is being required to move um our artificial intelligence, the labs that are building it, the companies that are building it forward uh at the velocity that's necessary. uh is going to be a specific challenge that that really requires a lot of thought. We we have a huge part of our organization focused on not just getting access to power but getting access to the size and scale of power that's going to be able to build the infrastructure you know at the scale of Abalene or or or close to it in order to um you know allow this to move forward. It's tough, right? And it will get harder uh as we move through time because the existing um uh infrastructure that does have uh opportunities, it has some level of elasticity is going to be consumed, and once that is consumed, you're going to get down to kind of a first principle. How do we get power uh online now? And that's really going to be challenging within the regulatory environment as it currently is configured.

Thank you, Mr. Smith. A similar question. How is Microsoft trying to secure power for its data centers? I mean, we read about that in the news recently, but what does federal policy need to focus on to make sure that we don't lose this race because we can't get enough energy?

Um, well, we invest to bring more electricity generation onto the grid and then to bring it through the grid to our data centers. Um, we probably have more permitting applications in more countries than quite possibly any company on the planet. Last time I looked at it, it was 872 applications in more than 40 countries. The number one challenge in the United States when it comes to permitting, interestingly enough, is not local. It's not state. It is the federal wetlands permit that is administered by the Army Corps of Engineers. We can typically get our local and state permits done in about 6 to 9 months. The national the wetlands permit is taking off in 18 to 24 months. Both the outgoing Biden administration and the incoming Trump administration have focused on this. But if we could just solve that, we could accelerate a lot here in this country.

Very helpful. Thank you, Mr. Alman. Much has been made about the Chinese open source models like Deep Seek. Uh, we spoke about that a month or two ago. A concern that I have is that accessible Chinese models promoted by the Chinese Communist Party might be an attractive option for AI application developers to build on top of uh particularly in developing world economies. So how important is US leadership in either open open source or closed AI models?

I think it's quite important to lead in both. Uh, we realize that we open AAI can do more to help here. So, we're going to release an open-source model that we believe will be the leading model this summer uh because we want people to build on the US stack. In terms of closed source models, a lot of the world uses our technology and the technology of our colleagues. We think we're in good shape there.

So, how could federal policy further help encourage AI ecosystem to be developed right here in the US?

Well, you touched on a great point with energy. Uh, I think it's hard to overstate how important energy is to the future here. The you know eventually chips network gear that will be made by robots and we'll make that very efficient and we'll make that cheaper and cheaper, but an electron is an electron; eventually the cost of intelligence the cost of AI will converge to the cost of energy and the a and if it'll be how much you can have the abundance of it will be limited by the abundance of energy uh so in terms of long-term strategic investments for the US to make I can't think of anything more important than energy uh yeah you know chips and all the other infrastructure also So, but but energy is where this I think this ends up.

Thank you, Chairman.

Um, Senator Kim.

Yeah, thank you. Um, Mr. Smith, I think I think I'd like to start with you because I I thought your point about like what exactly is the race, right? You keep talking about the race, and and you framed it in a particular way saying that it's about adoption in the rest of the world, the 78%. I I guess I just wanted to ask you to tease that out some more in terms of understanding what role we could play in Congress, in government in terms of trying to accelerate and champion that AI adoption internationally.

I think there's two things. The first is it just shines light on the importance of getting it right for export controls. Yeah. Which is the AI diffusion rule that's being discussed right now. And I think what it shows is we want to have I believe as a country the kinds of national security controls that ensure that say chips don't get diverted to China or get accessed by the wrong users say in China for the wrong reasons, and that is something that people have drafted at the same in in in the department of commerce at the same time we need I believe to say get rid of the quantitative caps that were created for all of these tier 2 countries because what they did was send a message to 120 nations that they couldn't necessarily count on us to provide the AI they want and need. And just think about it. I mean, if this is a critical part of your country's infrastructure, how can you make a bet on suppliers if you're not confident that they'll be able to fulfill your needs? So I think you in Congress

Two crown jewels of the national laboratories: Fermilab, America's premier particle physics and accelerator laboratory, and Argonne National Laboratory. Home to the Aurora Supercomputer that will accelerate breakthroughs in AI, cancer research, and fundamental physics.

There is nothing more important than sustaining and amplifying investments in our nation's incredible network of national labs. Yet, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, with the support of some Republicans in Congress, are applauding plans to take a chainsaw to the vital research initiatives being carried out across our country. This is a self-sabotaging attack, plain and simple. Um, and if allowed to proceed, Trump and Musk will inflict lasting harm on our innovative capabilities and capacity that our enemies could only dream of achieving.

Does anyone truly have confidence that had Doge been around decades ago, they would not have cut the project that created the internet as an example of wasteful publicly funded research and development? So my question to any member of the panel is the following: Can you explain the importance of the national lab system to maintaining our research edge and discuss any partnerships you've established or are currently pursuing, especially those threatened by massive cuts to the national labs' research? We partner with the national labs. So maybe I could take a first out of this. Uh, also, Senator, I'd love to get to visit a Fermilab someday. That would be like a question. That would be a real life. That would be very cool.

Um, there's many wonderful things that AI is going to do for the world. Uh, but the one that I am personally most excited about is the impact AI will have on scientific discovery. I believe that new scientific discovery is the most important input to the world getting better and people's quality of lives getting better, um, over time. It is, uh, it is hard to overstate where we would be, um, if where we are because of scientific advancement and where we we would be without it. So, we're thrilled to get to partner with the national labs on this. Um, I think science has not been as efficient as it can be, and we're we're also thrilled to hear from scientists that they're, you know, multiples more effective than they used to be. And I think that AI tools will mean we can accomplish at some point a decade worth of scientific progress in a year for the same cost or even less. Um, this this will be one of the most important contributions in my opinion that AI makes to the world. And um, it's no longer theoretical, like the national labs are are a great example. That's the only partnership where we've given a copy of our model weights to another organization. Uh, it's a a very deep and important partnership to us, and I expect that that will really bear fruit. Thank you. Anybody else on the panel?

Doc. Yeah, I I think you highlight a very important issue. You this country has 17 national labs administered by the department of energy and about 85 to 90 research universities, and you together they are the fabric of much of scientific discovery and have been since the Manhattan project in World War II. Um, we in the tech sector, we at Microsoft work with most almost all of them. And there's a particular cycle of innovation that the United States has mastered. You have curiosity-driven research in these institutions, and then the advances move out of those institutions into startups and into larger companies. And what I always find interesting is I meet with officials around the world, they have studied this. They seek to emulate it. And I always worry that in the United States, we run the risk of taking it for granted. We should never take this for granted. It is the foundation for the country's technological leadership.

Very much so. Dr. Sue, I just wanted to add to that. Uh, we are also very large supporters of the public-private partnerships with the national labs. I think the national labs have, um, you know, in a way always tried to look ahead of the curve, and you know, that's a great place for us to invest. We think they're a key piece. We have partnered with all of the national labs as well, um, you know, over the last decade, and you know, that continues to be a place where I think there can be significant public-private partnership.

Thank you, Mr. Enter. I I just think it would be really interesting to come to these AI factories and to walk through or travel through these institutions or and identify all the different pieces of the science that leads back and was ultimately driven and founded on something that came out of those institutions because I it's amazing actually. Thank you.

And would any of the remaining three of you would like to come to a lab in Illinois, either Fermi or Argonne? I will give you personal tours. All right, all four of you. It's done.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Senator Young.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for uh holding this important hearing on winning the AI race. It's it's good to see our panelists here. One of the things that um uh I like to underscore whenever I talk about this issue is uh we are not just discussing a race to create jobs, uh not just discussing uh a race to figure out how to eke out more growth from our economy, although that's important. Um, not just trying to identify how humans can flourish more, uh especially Americans, through uh application of AI solutions to our daily lives in various ways. But this is an issue of national and economic security. I want folks at home to get that. I know all our panelists are are highly conversant and and and knowledgeable about that.

Um, in my discussions with you and and and many others, I've heard we need to work with like-minded partners and allies to uh to win this race. And it's only going to be done collectively. I've heard here today from a number of you that um this race is in part about getting market share, diffusion of our AI models and and solutions into other countries. Uh, it is through that means, for me to perhaps elaborate on your thoughts, uh that we can see that our own values are advanced. Uh, these models, presumably they'll they'll be embedded with our values related to privacy and transparency and property rights and freedom of speech and religion, um, the not the values of the Chinese Communist Party on each of those various fronts, and then if we can establish digital trade rules, digital cross-border agreements on on digital trade with these other countries, we could conceivably erect higher barriers to entry for models that don't uh come embedded with our standards, models of of say the Chinese Communist Party has given sanction to. Um, so there's a geopolitical national security overlay to this entire conversation, which is why I think the chairman's emphasis on not overly constraining innovation uh or deployment is very important, but it's also why I think it's important that we be thinking about how to work with other countries um in their standards development. Um, and so that's that's where u I I want to begin asking questions. I'll start with uh Mr. Smith. If the United States doesn't adopt some standards through some entity, whether it's NIST or another federal entity or federally sanctioned entity, then um won't other nations go ahead and feel the need to adopt their standards without any consultation uh with the United States?

Uh, I think it's a really important point you make, and it is the lesson from the evolution of privacy law. Uh, the United States didn't adopt a national privacy law. Europe did twice, and most American companies of any size today apply across the United States work that complies with European privacy law. It's just more efficient. So I think the United States needs to be in the game internationally to influence the rest of the world. And you cannot be in the game if you do nothing. You must do something. So you take Senator Cruz's idea, a lightweight approach. Yes. And then you build support around it.

So just to unpack that, and I'll stick with Mr. Smith with apologies to everyone else because my time's limited. Um, would it be easier to shape the standards of other large economy countries that share most of our values if we already have a set of standards adopted? Generally, yes. I think we always have to be careful because if you go too soon, you go before the standards have really come together, but you've got to have some kind of model that you can show the rest of the world and win support for. And then presumably standards could be harmonized, right? They're not set in and and chiseled onto a a tablet, so to speak, right? No, that's indispensable. I mean, if our technology is going to go around the world, we need a set of laws or regulations that in effect create that basis for reciprocity and interoperability. Okay.

Um, I only have 25 seconds left. Are there any violent objections uh to Mr. Smith's uh position? Because that that seems eminently reasonable to me. Seems consistent with the light touch approach, but it also shows a certain sense of urgency that the United States needs to act. The last thing I'll say in my remaining 10 seconds is that uh I am planning on introducing legislation today called the AI public awareness and education campaign act with several of my colleagues. Uh, and uh our aim is is to have a whole-of-government approach to foster greater awareness of AI literacy and grow STEM opportunities to create the next generation uh of our workforce and um looking forward to moving that forward. So, uh, it will be available for, uh, public review, critique, uh, even accolades. And, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.

Thank you, Senator Bill Rochester. Thank you, Chairman Cruz, and thank you so much to the witnesses. Um, this is such an important hearing. Five minutes will not suffice for me. I'll be submitting some questions for the record. Um, I noticed that for Mr. Altman and, u, Mr. Smith, when the question of paint me a picture of the future came up, there was you actually leaned up in your chair. There was a level of excitement, and that's how I am about the future. Uh, when I came into the House of Representatives in 2017, I started a future of work uh bipartisan caucus because I had a concern that um number one there were certain groups of people that were going to be left behind, but there also as a country that we could be left behind. And I started I had one an event where we had everyone walk into the room and use a word cloud and tell me what you think of when you hear the future of work. The biggest word coming in the door was fear. The biggest word walking out the door was opportunity. And so to me, this conversation is so vital to think about the opportunities, but also making sure that we are watching out for ethics, watching out for scams, watching out for that technology does not take over the human. And so I am just grateful for the conversation and um Mr. Altman, I I listened to an interview uh about uh that you gave with Lester Holt uh maybe a year or so ago, and you talked in that interview about um how OpenAI it wasn't initially even about making a product. It wasn't about the money. And so I know you are incorporated in Delaware, and I understand you've been working with our attorney general um during uh the previously proposed legislation to transition to a for-profit not legislation but to transition to for-profit. And this Monday um OpenAI decided to apply to become a public benefit corporation instead and to have the PBC govern your nonprofit arm. um what went into this decision and what considerations influenced the timing of the organizational change?

So we we never Thank you for the question, Senator, and the chance to explain this. It's a complicated thing that I think has gotten misrepresented. So this is a wonderful forum to talk about it. Um, we never planned to have the nonprofit convert into anything. The nonprofit was always going to be the nonprofit. Um, and we also planned for a PBC from the very beginning. There were a bunch of other considerations about is it the PBC board that would control the nonprofit somehow or you know, h how our capital structure was going to work that there was a lot of speculation on, most of it inaccurate in the press. But our plan has always been to have a robust nonprofit. We hope our nonprofit will be one of the best, maybe someday the best resourced nonprofit in the world, and a PBC with the same mission that would make make it possible for us to raise the capital needed to deliver these tools and services at the quality level and availability level that people want to use them at but still stick to our mission, which we've been proud uh over the last almost decade of our of our progress towards. So, we had a lot of productive conversations with a lot of stakeholders and a lot of lawyers and a lot of regulators about the best way to do this. Um, it took longer than we thought it was going to. Um, you know, I would have guessed that, uh, we would have been talking about this last year, but now we have a a proposal that, uh, people seem pretty excited about, and we're trying to now advance.

And Dr. Sue, um, your company primarily operates in the physical hardware portion of the AI stack. Um, I have a bill with Senators Cantwell and Blackburn called the Promoting Resilient Supply Chains Act, which authorizes the Department of Commerce to strengthen American supply chains for critical industries and emerging technologies. Uh, Dr. Sue and others um semiconductor and chips manufacturing is critical to advancing the advancement of AI, but we're facing these global supply chain constraints. What specific policies and I know um you mentioned policies as well for a uh supply chains would we need to adopt uh to help American companies overcome uh the supply chain issues and compete in international with our rivals?

Thank you, Senator, for the question. Uh, there's no question the semiconductor supply chain uh and overall supply chains are really critical for us to win the AI race. Um, I think from a semiconductor standpoint, the efforts that have been made to move uh manufacturing back to the United States um have been positive. I think there are start there's a lot more that we can do, and one of the most important aspects of it is um really to think about it end to end. There's so many steps to go from beginning to end in a um in a semiconductor supply chain, including advanced wafers, including packaging, including the backends and and system test. All of those avenues need to have a footprint in the United States. And then we have many allies around the world which are you know very excellent partners as part of the global resiliency in the supply chain, and we would like to see um you know those partnerships continue to flourish.

And last question if I can um Mr. Smith, how do you see the interdependence between the AI stack sections creating either vulnerabilities or opportunities in the AI supply chain? I think they create more opportunities than vulnerabilities because it enables companies to do what they do best, and then we can work together, and you know the world today has an integrated supply chain for anything that you buy. We just don't think about it when we go to the grocery store. Um, I think one of the strengths of the tech sector is that we have I'll call it a string of pearls. Great companies in very in every layer of the stack, and we're going to need frankly more great companies, especially at the applications layer, and that it is how we work together. Thank you so much. I am out of time, but uh we will be following up with questions for the record as well as individually. Thank you, and I yield back Mr. Moran.

Chairman Lemus, thank you very much. Uh Mr. Smith, Mr. Smith mentioned uh data privacy uh which has been a topic of mine for a long time, and we've been unsuccessful in legislation being adopted, but I still have the goal of making certain that consumers have control over their own data, and I was going to ask you Mr. Altman how can we provide consumers with more control over how their data is used by AI companies while preserving the utility of the AI system. So, how do you get more privacy and still get the benefits?

So, there's all of the standard privacy controls that companies like ours and others build and should, but there's a new area that I'd love to flag for your consideration, which is people are sharing more information with AI systems than I think they have with previous generations of technology. And the maximum utility of these systems happens when the model can get very personalized to you. Um, so this is a wonderful thing, and we should find a way to enable it. But the the fact that these AI systems will get to know you over the course of your life so well, I think presents a new challenge and level of importance for how we think about privacy in the world of AI. How we're going to think about guaranteeing people privacy when they talk to an AI system about whatever's happened in their lives. How we make sure that when one system connects to another, it shares the appropriate information and doesn't share other information and that users are in control of that. Um, I I believe this will become one of the most important issues with AI in the coming years as people come to integrate this technology more into their lives, and I think it is a great area for you all to think about and take quite seriously. Uh, we do we just don't have any success in finding the conclusions, but thank you for the encouragement.

Um, I chair a commerce justice science appropriation subcommittee that funds the department of justice, and it plays a significant role in um cyber security of our country. Uh, I just came up from a budget hearing with the FBI director Dr. Patel in which we covered cyber security threats. AI can you and I think this is true. AI can be used on both sides of a cyber security attack, and it can be used to automate automate phishing, malware creation, but machine learning can also increase our ability to detect uh and respond to cyber threats. Um, what should Congress think about allocation of federal resources for cyber security and what should we consider when it comes to AI?

Well, I would say that, you know, AI, as you said, is both an offensive weapon and a defensive shield when it comes to cyber security. And as with many other things, the front line of this the last few years has been in Ukraine because Russia has such a sophisticated cyber attack capability. And you know what we've found as a a company that's been involved in supporting Ukraine since literally the moment that war began is that AI is a game-changer. Um, you know, we have intercepted attacks against Ukraine faster than a human could detect them, and we block those attacks from taking place. So you deploy AI into call it the front line of the products themselves. Um, we have to recognize that the it's ultimately the people who defend not just countries but companies and governments, the chief information security officers or the CISOs, you know, so we've created what's called a cyber security co-pilot that basically automates for those individuals much of the workflow that takes their time so that they can be more effective and efficient when it comes to federal appropriation. I think that to put it simply, the United States government must remain at the forefront of having for itself the cyber security capabilities that it needs to defend the government and every day. I mean, we are in government agencies today during this hearing, you know, pushing Chinese out of agencies and the like, and this will be happen every day of every year from now to probably eternity. So we must keep the US government well funded in this space, and I think we also need our intelligence agencies and especially the NSA to be well funded so they can remain at the forefront when it comes to global leadership in this field.

Uh, thank you for your observations and and encouragement. My final question, uh, rural areas, a place I come from, um, often lack high-speed broadband, and since many AI tools rely upon connectivity, I'm concerned that many parts of the country and many parts of Kansas may not be able to access the benefits that AI will bring to business, schools, health care, etc. What can the federal government do to be supportive of development and availability of on-device or low-bandwidth uh AI systems that do not rely on constant connectivity?

I'm generally pretty excited about what AI will do here because you can offload so much of the processing to the cloud uh and then ship a relatively small amount of data. If you think about, you know, ChatGPT is text comes in, there's like a brain that thinks about it really hard, and some text comes back. We can support people in low connectivity areas quite well with the same quality of service. I separately to that, I think getting great connectivity everywhere is important, but in the specific area of AI, I think we can actually address that uh address that gap quite well.

That's good to know. Thank you very much, Mr. Lujan. Thank you, Madam Chair. And first I want to begin by recognizing and thanking Mr. Altman and Mr. Smith for your organization's ongoing involvement in the NIST US AI Safety Institute as well as Dr. Sue and Mr. Altman for your ongoing partnerships with our national laboratories. Now Dr. Sue, Mr. Altman, can you explain how your partnership with the national labs support scientific research? You explained this uh to a question that was asked by Senator Duckworth as well, but if you could just touch on that quickly.

Our latest models uh like GPT-3 are good at scientific reasoning. And so scientists are able to use these to help them review literature, come up with new ideas, propose experiments, um analyze data in a way that the previous generations of models just couldn't. We've had the national labs and other scientists spend time with previous models, and they say, "Oh, this is, you know, kind of cool. It's interesting," and it's not transforming thing the things these these new models are the first time we're hearing from scientists at the national labs and elsewhere that this is a legitimate game-changer to their research output.

Appreciate that, Dr. Sue. Yeah, I would add um the same. I think our partnerships with the national labs have seen just um you know tremendous opportunity. Uh, we have large-scale compute um across the national labs, and the ability to really develop new applications that take advantage of let's call it traditional high-performance computing together with the new AI model capability that we just talked about is I think a great opportunity to substantially move forward the ability for scientific discovery.

To to both of you again. Can you explain why federal investment in foundational research and standards bodies are crucial to your companies?

I I think standards can help uh increase the rate of innovation, but it's important that the industry figure out what they should be first. Uh, I think a bad standard can really set things back, and we've seen many examples of that in history. I do think there's a new protocol to discover here at the level of importance of HTTP. This is just one example. There's many other things too. Um, I believe the industry will figure that out through some fits and starts and and then I think officially adopting that can be helpful.

Dr. Sue, I believe uh public-private partnerships really enable us to think let's call it ahead of the curve. So there are lots of things that we do in industry, and we do them very very well. Um, however, the the beauty of the national labs and federal research is it does allow let's call it a bit more blue-sky research, and I think that's a very you know positive add. So I think the key is how we can make sure that you know one federal dollar goes much much further than that with a a private investment on top of that.

Yesterday, I reintroduced a piece of legislation called the Test AI Act, which has bipartisan support, which would simply improve the federal government's capacity to test and evaluate in this area as well. Uh, so very much appreciate both your responses. Um, but this is just one of many steps I would argue that is needed to uh ensure that the United States stays ahead. Now, despite strong support across the country, including from industry leaders here today, President Trump's annihilating budgets for basic research, and there are questions abound by so many. I'll argue that this will destroy our nation's competitive advantage. Um, I simply just call on all my colleagues that we look at the investments to the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Department of Energy, Office of Science. Let's work together; uh, if there's questions that we have, let's find ways to address those, but let's ensure that these investments are making a positive difference so that we have more successes and more hearings celebrating what we're celebrating today. Now, beyond your partnership with the federal government, I would like to know more about how you partner with local communities when building out centers. Um,

Proud author of the AI Civil Rights Act, which would ensure that companies review and eliminate bias and discrimination in their algorithms before developing and deploying them. It has to happen simultaneously, and it will hold companies accountable when their algorithms cause harms against marginalized populations. I will be fighting to ensure AI does not stand for accelerating inequality in our nation.

All of the protections we have in the real world should be moved to the virtual world because the same discriminations against women, Black, Brown, communities with disabilities, and the LGBTQ community are going to move online, and we have to build in the protections against that bias right up front. Because otherwise, those same discriminatory practices will just migrate immediately, and the responsibility of the industry will be to work with Congress to make sure we put those protections on the books. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Senator Peters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to all our witnesses. Thank you for being here. It's a credibly important topic, and we appreciate your expertise as we're looking at making sure that the United States is the world leader in AI.

Certainly, we've been talking about supply chains and infrastructure and all of those aspects, but one area that I want to particularly focus on is workforce and people to make sure that we have the talent there. That's why I authored the AI Scholarship for Service Act and the AI Training Act. Both of those were signed into law in 2022. Earlier this year, I introduced my AI and critical technology workforce framework act to continue the effort along those lines and would love to work with each of you as we look at other legislation necessary to make sure we've got the workforce trained to take advantage of this amazing technology.

I do want to do a shout-out to the University of Michigan that actually became the first university in the world to provide generative AI tools for their entire student body to prepare them for the workforce of tomorrow. So I want to talk a little bit about the workforce, but Mr. Alman, when we met last year in my office and had a great conversation, you said that upwards of 70% of jobs could be eliminated by AI, and you acknowledged the possible social disruption of this. If that's happening, we have to prepare for it. We're not going to stand in the way of the incredible opportunities here. But if this is indeed going to occur, we've got to be thinking pretty deeply about how that will be managed and make sure that everybody can benefit from AI, not just the select few that benefit. So talk to me about how you believe leaders in your industry can help mitigate job losses or deal with what could, as you described it last year, be a major social disruption.

The thing that I think is different this time than previous technological revolutions is the potential speed. Technological revolutions have impacted jobs and the economy for a long time. Some jobs go away; some new jobs get created; many jobs just get more efficient, and people are able to do more and earn more money and create more, and that's great. Over some period of time, society can adapt to a huge amount of job change, and you can look at the last couple of centuries and see how much that's happened. I don't know—I don't think anyone knows exactly how fast this is going to go—but it feels like it could be pretty fast.

The most important thing, or one of the most important things I think we can do, is to put tools in the hands of people early. We have a principle that we call iterative deployment. We want people to be getting used to this technology as it's developed. We've been doing this now for almost five years since our first product launch. As society and this technology co-evolve, putting great capable tools in the hands of a lot of people and letting them figure out the new things that they're going to do and create for each other and come up with and provide sort of value back to the world on top of this new building block we have and the sort of scaffolding of society—that is, I think, the best thing we can do as OpenAI and as our industry to help smooth this transition.

The idea is we want to get to a point where AI isn't displacing work but actually enhancing work, that people are more productive and doing things that we probably can't even imagine. What people will do if we look 100 years ago—we have jobs that no one can imagine—and I don't think we can imagine the jobs on the other side of this. But even if you look today at what's happening with programming, which I'll pick because it's sort of my background and near and dear to my heart, what it means to be a programmer and you know an effective programmer in May of 2025 is very different than what it meant the last time I was here in May of 2023. These tools have really changed what a programmer is capable of, the amount of code and software that the world is going to get. And it's not like people don't hire software engineers anymore. Right. They work in a different way, and they're way more productive. Right.

Right. Dr. Sue, we certainly talk a lot about open-source AI, but most of the conversation has been about software. However, making technology open and able to work together matters at every level, as you know, from chips that power the devices to the servers that are running behind the scenes. So my question for you is, what are the benefits of open standards and system interoperability at the hardware level, not the software level, and what are the implications for innovation, national security, as well as resilience in the supply chain?

Yeah, thank you for the question, Senator. I think there are an incredible number of advantages to having an open ecosystem at the hardware and the software and the application level. The idea is there's no one organization or one group that has all the good ideas, and so enabling the ecosystem to work together so that you can choose the best solution at every level and then also optimization across a broad set of constituents is a good thing. I think it's also very—a single ecosystem. So we continue to be very forward-thinking in open standards as well as open ecosystems.

So your model is an open model. I understand Nvidia is a closed model. Is there—what are the advantages, disadvantages? What which—what should we be thinking about?

I think the major advantage in an open model, and that is something that we very much support, is the idea that we can have innovation come from many different parties, and you know whether that is hardware innovation, so on the different chips, or that is system innovation on putting all these things together, and our goal is to make sure that we always have the best of the best, and there are many different ways, many different parties that can contribute to that, and that's why we are very forward-leaning in terms of open ecosystems.

Great. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Senator Feldman. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Hello, Mr. Smith. I'm a big supporter of energy; for me, energy security is national security, and of course, you know, renewables about that, but of course, other things as well, too—fossil, but also that also includes nuclear. Of course, nuclear is important, and now then there's that kind of energy transition. My focus is I want to make sure that ratepayers in Pennsylvania really aren't hit too hard throughout all of this. Now, the Washington Post reported that increasing electricity demand for the data centers is going to raise up residential power bills perhaps as much by 20%. Now that's really a concern for me and certainly for Pennsylvania families. Now, the data center has important jobs during construction and doing those things, and that's a great thing, of course, but they're not, I guess, most long-term, but that rate—those rates might last longer for that. And now I've been very much tracking the plan to reopen TMI. I mean, my own personal story is I had to grab my hamster and evacuate during the meltdown in 1979. You might assume that I was anti-nuclear, and that is not—I actually am very supportive of nuclear because that's an important part of the stack if you really want to have and address climate change. You can't turn your back on nuclear in my opinion. But I know that's the power—n—Microsoft's data center. So now, and I really appreciate that. But if I'm saying now if we're able to commit that the power purchase agreement is not going to raise electricity for Pennsylvania families.

And no, I think you raise a critical point. We have two principles that we follow when we're constructing these data centers. Number one, we will invest to bring onto the grid an amount of electricity that equals the amount of electricity that we will use so that we're not tapping a constricted supply. Number two, we will manage all of this in a way that ensures that our activity does not raise the price of electricity to the community. And so I was describing earlier how if there are improvements that need to be made to the grid, as there often are, we'll go to the utility commission. We will propose a change in the rate that we are charged so that we can pay for that improvement. I just think it's a fact of life because I think you highlight something critical. There's a lot of jobs when the construction takes place; there are jobs afterward, but they are not as many. One will wear out the welcome quickly if we tax, in effect, the neighborhood by asking everyone to pay more for their electricity because we have arrived. We get it; we know we have to be a good and responsible member of the neighborhood. Thank you.

Well, and now, one of the perks of being a senator, that for me anyway, I get an opportunity to meet people that have much more impressive kinds of jobs or careers that I've had. And now, Mr. Alman, now this is going—I'm going to count this as a highlight recently, like—I know the work that you've done; you're really one of the people that are moving AI, and now it's—it's an opportunity. I was excited to meet you, and now people—people ask me, it's like, if you're going to talk about AI, and now I get to ask you—I mean, you're like the literal expert, you know—some people are worried about AI or whatever, and I'm like, you know what about the singularity? So, you know, the people like that—if you would address that, please.

Thank you, Senator, for the kind words and for normalizing hoodies in more spaces. I love to see that. I am incredibly excited about the rate of progress, but I also am cautious, and I would say like—I don't know—I feel small next to it or something. I think this is beyond something that we all fully yet understand where it's going to go. This is—this is, I believe, among the biggest—maybe it will turn out to be the biggest—technological revolutions humanity will have ever produced, and I feel privileged to be here. I feel curious and interested in what's going to happen. But I do think things are going to change quite substantially. I think humans have a wonderful ability to adapt, and things that seem amazing will become the new normal very quickly. We'll figure out how to use these tools to just do things we could never do before, and I think it will be quite extraordinary. But these are going to be tools that are capable of things that we can't quite wrap our heads around, and some people call that—you know, as these tools start helping us to create next-future iterations—some people call that singularity; some people call that the takeoff. Whatever it is, it feels like a sort of new era of human history, and I think it's tremendously exciting that we get to live through that, and we can make it a wonderful thing, but we've got to approach it with humility and some caution.

No, I mean, I—it—for me, it's—it's been—I get a chance to ask questions to a lot of Edisons, you know, as well too, like the kinds of things that you're all collectively involved in are going to transform our society, and people will look back 50, 60 years ago and see what's happened. So to me—over to the chairman. Thank you.

Thank you, Senator Feldman. Senator Klobuchar, thank you. Good thoughts, Senator Federman. Thank you.

So you guys have been sitting here so long that the pope has been chosen. Wow. Well, we don't know who. Congratulations, Amy. White smoke has come up. Congratulations. What? You're welcome. Probably wouldn't work.

But in any case, I left for some other things, came back because I had one more question that I wanted to ask, and it's related to just the whole deep-fake issue, just because Senator Blackburn and Senator Coons and Senator Tillis and I have worked on this really hard, and they're—Blackburn and Coons are in the lead of the bill. But we have recently seen deep-fake videos of Al Roker promoting to remove more than 75,000 songs with unauthorized deep fakes, including voices of Harry Styles, Beyonce. I recently met—it's not just famous people. There is a Grammy-nominated artist from Minnesota. I talked to him about what's going on with digital replicas. So there's a real concern, and it kind of gets at what Senator Schatz and I were talking about earlier with the news bill. But I just wanted to make you all aware of this legislation because there were some differences on this, and now we have gotten a coalition including YouTube supporting it, as well as the Recording Industry Association, Motion Picture Association, SAG-AFTRA. So it's a big deal, and I'm hoping it's something that you will all look at, but could you just comment? I would go to you, Mr. Smith first, about protecting people from having their likenesses replicated through AI without permission. And even if you all pledge to do it, our obvious concern is that there will maybe be other companies that wouldn't. And that's why I think as we look at what these guardrails are, the protection of digital people's digital rights should be part of this. Mr. Smith.

Yeah. No, I think you're right to point to it. It has become a growing area of concern. During the presidential election last year, both campaigns, both political parties were concerned about the potential for deep fakes to be created. We worked with both campaigns and both parties to address that. We see it being used in really ways that I would call abusive, including of celebrities and the like. I think it starts with an ability to identify when something has been created by AI and is not a genuine, say, photographic or video image. And we do find that AI is much more capable at doing that than, say, the human eye and human judgment. I think it's right that there be certain guardrails, and some of these we can apply voluntarily. We've been doing that across the industry. OpenAI and Microsoft were both part of that last year. And there are certain uses that probably should be considered across the line and therefore should be unlawful. And I think that's where the kinds of initiatives that you're describing have a particularly important role to play.

And could you look at that legislation? Absolutely. Appreciate it. Mr. Alman, just the same question, same thing.

Sorry. Of course, we'd be happy to look at the legislation. I think this is a big issue, and it's one coming quickly. I do not believe—I think there are a few areas to attack it. You can talk about AI that generates content, platforms that distribute it, how takedowns work, how we educate society, and how we build in robustness to expect this is going to happen. I do not believe it will be possible to stop the generation of the content. I think open-source, open-weight models are a great thing on the whole and something we need to pursue, but it does mean that there's going to be just a lot of these models floating around that can do this. The mass distribution—I think it's possible to put some more guardrails in place, and that that seems important. But I don't want to neglect the societal education piece. I think with every new technology there's some sort of—almost always some sort of new scams that come. The sooner we can get people to understand these, be on the lookout for them, talk about this as a thing that's coming and then a thing that's happening, I think the better. People are very quickly understanding that content can be AI-generated and building new kinds of defenses in their own minds about it. But still, if you get a call and it sounds exactly like someone you know and they're panicked and they need help, or if you see a video that was like the videos you talked about, this gets at us in a very deep psychological way, and I think we need to build societal resilience because this is coming. It's coming, but we can—there—there's got to be some ways to protect privacy rights, and you've got to have some way to either enforce it, damages, whatever, or there's just not going to be any consequences.

Absolutely. We should have all of that. Bad actors still don't always follow the laws, and so I think we need an additional shield whenever we can have them. But yes, we should absolutely protect that. All right. Look forward to working with you on it. Thank you.

So I have to say Senator Klobuchar's question about fakes and AI fakes made me feel guilty because I did in fact tweet out an AI-generated picture of Senator Federman as the Pope of Greenland. So I am guilty of doing so, although it may not be a fake. It may be a real—

Hey. Oh, whoa. Whoa. Parody is allowed under the law. Parody is allowed. That is different than what I'm talking about. But Senator Federman should respond.

Yeah, it may be—it's a good shot actually.

All right. I have a few more questions, and then we will wrap up. Mr. Alman, what has been the most surprising use for ChatGPT you've seen? What—what—what are applications that you're seeing that are surprising?

You know, people message ChatGPT billions of times per day. So they use it for all sorts of incredibly creative things. I will tell one personal story, which is I mentioned earlier, I recently had a newborn. Clearly, people did it, but I don't know how people figured out how to take care of newborns without ChatGPT. That has been a real lifesaver. So I will tell you a story that I've told you before, but my teenage daughter several months ago sent me this long, detailed text, and it was emotional, and it was really well written, and I actually commented, I'm like, "Wow, this is really well written." She said, "Oh, I used ChatGPT to write it." Like, wait, you're texting your dad, and you don't—it is something about the new generation that it is so seamlessly integrated into life that she's sending an email, she's doing whatever, and she doesn't even—doesn't even hesitate to think about going to ChatGPT to capture her thoughts. I have complicated feelings about that.

Well, use the app and then tell me what you're—Okay. Um, Google just revealed that their search traffic on Safari declined for the first time ever. They didn't send me a Christmas card. Will ChatGPT replace Google as the primary search engine? And if so, when?

Probably not. I mean, I think some use cases that people use search engines for today are definitely better done on a service like ChatGPT, but Google is like a ferocious competitor. They have a very strong AI team, a lot of infrastructure, a very well-protected business, and they're making great progress putting AI into their search.

All right. So a question that I—I—I have spent a lot of time talking to business leaders, CEOs in the tech space, AI, and one question that I've asked that I get different answers on, and I'm curious what the four of you say. How big a deal was DeepSeek? Is it a major, seismic, shocking development from China? Is it not that big a deal? Is it somewhere in between? And what's coming next? And let's each of the four of you—

Not not a huge deal. There are two things about DeepSeek. One is that they made a good open-source model, and the other is that they made a consumer app that, for the first time, briefly surpassed ChatGPT as the most downloaded AI tool, maybe the most downloaded app overall. There are going to be a lot of good open-source models, and clearly there are incredibly talented people working at DeepSeek doing great research. So I'd expect more great models to come. Hopefully, also us and some of our colleagues will put out great models too. On the consumer app, I think if a—if the DeepSeek consumer app looked like it was going to beat ChatGPT and our American colleagues' apps as sort of the default AI systems that people use, that would be bad. But that does not currently look to us like what's happening.

I would say it's somewhere in between. Chairman Cruz, when you think about what we've learned, what we learned is there are different ways of doing things. So we have lots of incredibly innovative people in the United States; American models are clearly the best by far. However, when you have constraints that are placed, there are other ways of doing things, and I think we learned a few things in the process. I think the open-source nature of DeepSeek was one of the things that probably was most impactful in just terms of how much can be done in an open-source type of model and open ecosystem, but clearly, the United States is leading, and we need to continue, as we said, to accelerate innovation and adoption, as you started this hearing with.

I think DeepSeek did a lot of things. One of the things that it did was it—it—it sort of raised the specter of China's AI capability to a much broader audience than was perhaps focused on it prior to that, right? And so you saw that kind of reverberate through the financial markets; you saw like broad-based reaction, and suddenly everyone knows what DeepSeek is and the fact that China is not theoretically in the race for AI dominance but actually is very much a formidable competitor. And so, you know, it was a starting gun in some ways for the broader population and kind of maybe the broader consciousness of the fact that this is not a fait accompli and that we're going to have to work as America together to propel our solutions forward. And so I think that was one of the lasting impacts that we will see from that.

I would say, like Lisa, that somewhere in between—it wasn't shocking. I mean, it was one of a number of startups that we were following in China that we saw as having the potential to be innovative in this space. I do think there's a really interesting and important point that constraints encourage innovation in other ways, and I just think one of the interesting facts about DeepSeek is that of their, say, 200 or more employees—that was their size when they released these models—almost all of their employees, by design, were four years or less out of university. They wanted to hire people that would not bring to their work traditional ways of doing things.

So the kids are taking over the world. They too—every generation.

Related to that, were you finished with that, Mr. Smith?

Related to that, we talked at the—

Outset about the AI diffusion rule being rescinded, which I'm glad. I think it was a bad rule. I think it was overly complex. I think it put on a number of our trading partners unfair restrictions. Uh, but and so I'm glad the the president is is rescending it. That doesn't necessarily mean that there should be no restrictions. And and I there are a variety of views uh on whether there what the rules should be concerning AI diffusion.

Nvidia has argued that we want American chips everywhere, even in China. Uh, others have argued that we want to restrict at least the most advanced uh processors. I I'm curious each of the four of you what do you think the rule should be if anything is to replace the AI diffusion rule, and Mr. Alman, we'll start with you.

I also was glad to see that rescinded. Uh, I agree there will need to be some constraints, but I I think if our if the sort of mental model is winning diffusion instead of stopping diffusion, that directionally seems right. That doesn't mean there's no guardrails. It doesn't mean we say like we're going to go build a bigger data center in some other country than the US. Our intention is to build our biggest and best data centers in the US, do training in the US, build the models here, have our core research here. Um, but then we do want to build inference centers with our partners around the world, and we've been working with the US government on that. I think that'll be that'll be good. Um, I to to this point that influence comes from people adopting US products and services up and down the stack. Maybe most obviously if they're using Chad GPT versus DeepSeek, but also if they're using US chips and US data center technology and all the amazing stuff Microsoft does. Uh, that's a win for us, and I think we should embrace that but make sure that you know the most critical stuff, the creation of these models that will be so impactful, that that should still happen here.

Dr. Sue, I think we would totally agree with the the uh concept that um some restrictions are necessary. This is a matter of national security as much as it is about um AI diffusion. Uh, that being uh the case, we were happy to see the uh the rescinding as well. And you know, we view this as an opportunity to really simplify, right? At the end of the day, uh you know, we've talked about the need to drive widespread adoption of uh our technology and our ecosystem. Um, you know, simple rules that can be um, you know, easily applied uh that really allow our allies to, you know, protect our technology while still utilizing the best that the United States has to offer. I think is a um a good start in terms of where we're going, and you know, again this is an area where um I think the devil's in the details and it requires a lot of balance and so uh from an industry standpoint, you know, it's our job to put on the broader hat and work hand-in-hand uh with the administration and congress to u you know, make our best recommendations so that it is a policy that has some stability as we go forward as well.

Mr. Traitor. So, so I'll I'll echo what Sam and Lisa said, but you know, national security is paramount, and then once you've addressed the limitations around national security, um the opportunity to work with regulators to put together uh uh a regulatory framework beyond that makes a lot of sense. And the diffusion rule didn't allow us that opportunity to participate fully enough to feel like we were going to come away with what would be uh an optimal outcome at this point.

Mr. Smith, um I think we've all discussed the right recipe. Simplify, um eliminate these tier 2 quantitative restrictions that undermine confidence in access to American technology. Uh, but enable even the most advanced GPUs the country has to be exported to data centers that are run by a trusted provider that meet certain security standards; that means both physical and cyber security standards; that there is protection against diversion of the chips; and there are uh precautions against certain uses; and that means two things: one is that there are controls in place to ensure that say the PLA, the Chinese military, isn't accessing and using these advanced models or advanced chips uh you know in a data center regardless of the country that it's in. And there are certain harmful uses that one should want to prohibit and preclude, like using a model to create the next that can be retained and can move forward, and that strikes the right balance.

Okay. Final question uh for each of you. Would you support a 10-year learning period on states issuing comprehensive AI regulation or some form of federal preemption to create an even playing field for AI developers and deployers?

I'm not sure what a 10-year learning period means, but uh I think having one federal approach focused on light touch and an even playing field sounds great to me.

Aligned federal approach with um you know really you know thoughtful uh regulation would be uh very very much appreciated.

I agree with both of my colleagues.

Yeah. I think you know that builds obviously on the op-ed that you and Senator Graham published uh last year, and I think giving the country time, your analogy, your example was this work for the internet. Um, there's a lot of details that need to be hammered out, but you giving the federal government the ability to lead, especially in areas around product safety and and and pre-release uh reviews and the like would help this industry grow.

Well, I want to thank each of the witnesses. This was a very interesting hearing. It was informative. These issues matter. Uh, you saw a great deal of interest on both sides of the aisle in this topic. Uh, and so I appreciate each of you are very busy and doing a lot of things, and I appreciate you being here today. Uh, senators will have until the close of business on Thursday, May 15th to submit questions for the record, and the witnesses will have until the end of the day on Thursday, May 29th to respond to those questions. And with that, uh, that concludes today's hearing. The committee stands adjourned.

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testifies at Senate hearing on artificial intelligence | full video

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