Congressional Daily Record
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Official title: LEGISLATIVE SESSION
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September 29, 2026
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Download official Senate Record PDFReturn to issue contextRATEPAYER PROTECTION ACT—Motion to Proceed
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The senior assistant executive clerk read as follows:
Motion to proceed to Calendar No. 684 (H.R. 9340), to amend
the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 to
establish a Federal standard relating to the recovery of the
full, incremental costs of upgrades that serve large-load
customers, and for other purposes.
Rural Health Transformation Program
Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, we are coming to the end of the first year of the Rural Health Transformation Program. This multiyear initiative created in Republicans' Working Families Tax Cut legislation will invest $50 billion in all 50 States to put rural healthcare providers on a more sustainable footing for the future.
healthcare, it will also ensure that providers are able to leverage technology and innovation to address the challenges unique to rural States.
certainly the case in my home State of South Dakota. Just last week, CMS announced a $13 million investment in behavioral and mental health care in South Dakota. This funding will help expand crisis services and build out our State's workforce in behavioral healthcare, and it comes after another announcement in August of funding to modernize technology and strengthen cyber security at rural healthcare providers in South Dakota, an initiative that will not only modernize care in my State but also support future innovation to address the unique needs of rural South Dakota.
last summer, we didn't take a top-down, Washington-Senate approach. Instead, we designed it to give States the resources and freedom to find solutions to their particular challenges, and I am proud to see South Dakota taking the same approach when it comes to distributing the funding that it will receive.
“the initiatives that we've developed came strictly from the assessments we had, the expert input we garnered, and what citizens themselves said they needed in the community.”
supposed to work, and it is not just working in South Dakota. As I mentioned, all 50 States are taking advantage of this transformative program.
Ohio is putting $3 million toward expanding offerings at pharmacies in rural communities.
A nearly $5 million award will help a hospital in central Maine update its electric medical records system to integrate it with the wider health system it is part of.
Providers in Kansas will benefit from nearly $17 billion this year to support new technologies and improve transportation options for specialty healthcare.
And Missouri will use $35 million to support 20 rural hospital projects and another $4 million to train its rural EMS workforce.
And a nonprofit in Alaska received $16 million to improve primary care offerings and bring in more providers and staff.
year of this program. As this list suggests, the Rural Health Transformation Program will make an impact in every corner of this country. All 50 States are receiving funding from this program, red States and blue States alike, which makes Senate Democrats' opposition to this program particularly baffling.
Health Transformation Program very clear, with the Democrat leader going so far as to say this last year:
This little fund to help reimburse rural hospitals is just
a fraud.
Let me repeat that.
This little fund to help reimburse rural hospitals is just
a fraud.
That is from the Democrat leader.
Governor, who said of a recent $76 million investment from this program:
These investments will bring rural hospitals, health
centers and community providers together to strengthen
regional health care networks and make it easier for New
Yorkers to get the care they need closer to home.
That is from New York's Governor.
Let me repeat that:
. . . and make it easier for New Yorkers to get the care
they need closer to home.
Well, that doesn't sound like fraud to me. But whether this would help the people in rural parts of their States didn't seem to matter to Washington Democrats. In fact, Senate Democrats voted more than half a dozen times, last year, to repeal—repeal—the Rural Health Transformation Program.
That is right.
shutdown, Senate Democrats were working to end this program. I am curious if the Democrat leader would like to claw back the $212 million that rural healthcare providers in New York are going to receive from this program this year.
Democrats are going to take it back the next time they have the power to do so? Let's hope it never comes to that.
areas across this country. It is helping South Dakota, Ohio, Idaho, Kansas, Rhode Island, Alaska, and everywhere in between. And I am proud that Republicans are delivering for rural Americans.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant executive clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The majority whip.
Trump Administration
Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, I want to talk today about action, action Republicans are taking to lower the costs for American people.
Let's start with the cost of energy. We need to be able to build, to build things faster, better, cheaper, smarter. That is what we need in America today.
do it all across the country. There are critical energy projects right now that have been spending years trapped in regulatory purgatory. They have been in the penalty box.
further than that. Republicans are committed to permitting reform, and the Presiding Officer has been one leading the charge. Senators Capito and Lee who chair the appropriate committees have spent months and months working on this critical topic.
block our efforts. Democrats are objecting to solutions that actually would work to lower the cost of energy, to keep more money in people's pockets. Democrats seem to embrace higher energy costs, and they have a long history of doing that.
agenda, to keep the energy, American energy, in the ground. Last week, Senate Democrats blocked a bill from Senator Jon Husted of Ohio, a bill called the Ratepayer Protection Act, again, designed to keep more money in people's pockets. It relates to energy.
Senator Husted's bill protects American workers; that is why it is called the Ratepayer Protection Act. Senator Husted's bill guarantees that large users of energy, of electricity such as data centers, that they would end up paying the full cost of their electricity use, not the consumers.
upgrades to the grid. They are responsible
for what they need and what they are doing. Well, this will block costs going up for families so that people aren't forced to pay more; not just families but small businesses as well.
Representatives already. It passed the House of Representatives 417 to 3. That doesn't happen all that often. That is overwhelming support. And 206 Democrats actually voted for it. You would expect there would be similar numbers here. The American people support it. Democrats in the House support it. All the Republicans support it, but yet Democrats here in the Senate following Senator Schumer stand in the way of relief for folks at home.
We need to pass it. We need to pass Senator Husted's Ratepayer Protection Act. Republicans are going to continue to fight to get it done, in spite of the delays by the Democrats. Tomorrow we are going to vote on this again, on Senator Husted's bill.
So Democrats tomorrow will have a choice: They can join Republicans in helping to lower costs for American families, or they can explain to American families why their party continues to stand in the way of relief.
more of their hard-earned money. When Americans keep more of what they earn, the economy grows. And I have always said people at home with money in their pocket have a much better time figuring out how to spend it or save it or invest it than does the government.
Across the country, more people are working. Take-home pay is rising. These are good signs. The Wall Street Journal recently pointed out “it is one of the best job markets in decades” for young adults without college degrees.
That is where the country stands today. Last year, the American people faced the largest tax increase in America's history. Had Democrats gotten their way, there would have been an increase of taxes of $4 trillion. Democrats would have snatched hard-earned money away and right out of the pockets of our firefighters, police officers, nurses, and waiters.
Republicans stopped that largest tax increase in history. We got rid of the tax on tips. We got rid of the tax on overtime. We eliminated tax on Social Security. More money in people's pockets. And then on top of that, we expanded the child tax credit. It is now $2,200 per child. We delivered permanent relief—you know about this as do I, in my home State, from the dreaded death tax.
Millions—farmers, ranchers, small business owners—have benefited. We permanently raised the standard deduction; that helps people keep more of what they earn. As a result of the Working Families Tax Cuts law, 97 percent of Americans received a tax cut when they filed their tax return last year.
last years. People who benefited the most: people who earn less than $200,000 a year. Also, one of the unique aspects of the Republicans' tax cuts bill are called the Trump Accounts. They are brand new. They are tax-advantaged investment accounts. Every American child can have one. Every child born between 2025 and 2028 starts with $1,000 in this account coming directly from the U.S. Treasury.
Trump Accounts follow a very American idea: When families are free to invest their own money, their children can build wealth for the future. Millions of children in families all across America are using these Trump Accounts. Parents, family members, churches, community groups, and even employers are contributing as well. I am seeing it in my home State.
committed to invest $1,000 into Trump Accounts for each of their employees' children—every one of them. Other businesses are doing the same. They are following the example.
valuable accounts—every one of them—and that includes the two Senators from Georgia where Delta Airlines is headquartered.
Democrats refuse to even put children's financial interests first. As Republicans fight to put more money into people's pockets, we continue to crack down on waste and fraud and abuse and corruption. And people watching the news have seen it.
fraud in our healthcare system. It identified three-quarters of a million names—not necessarily people but names—that were fraudulent, improper, and ineligible for ObamaCare.
associated with it. Many of the names were signed up without actually an individual knowing about it. It was insurance brokers gaming the system, and they earned a commission for each one of these new accounts. We are putting an end to this.
people made—if they were people or not—no identification of identity, income, or immigration status. Red warning lights were flashing, signaling fraud and corruption.
And the crackdown on this fraud is helping taxpayers save $2.2 billion. That ensures that more money and services go to the people who actually have earned it, need it, and deserve it.
Democrats want to keep the money flowing out of the Federal Treasury. It is astonishing. I remember Joe Biden and the Democrats—they enabled this fraud. They seemed to welcome it. Enrollment doubled under ObamaCare on their watch without justification and often falsehoods.
signing up, putting names on the roll, big checks that went directly from the taxpayers to the Federal Treasury, into the pockets of healthcare companies. Perverse incentives encouraged liberal Governors to spend money from Medicaid without any oversight. We have seen it all.
Minnesota—money going to phony treatment centers. In California, it went to phantom hospice providers—made up but the money kept flowing. Republicans are committed to stopping this abuse and to making sure that criminals pay the price.
morning—cutting energy costs, cutting taxes, fighting fraud and corruption—this is a core difference between commonsense Republicans and the craziness that has taken over the Democratic Party.
money, more of what they earn. Democrats seem to want more money going to the Federal Government so that they can turn around and spend it. That is why Democrats are determined to repeal the Working Family Tax Cut law—because it means a direct tax increase on every American.
on firefighters, on police officers, and on our seniors. What do they want to use the money for? They have said it. A number of their candidates have said it around the country. They said so they can provide healthcare for illegal immigrants with taxpayers paying for it. That is the new Democratic Party.
country. You read through it: Shut down the military. Shut down the police. Defund this. Open the prisons. Put the dangerous criminals into our communities.
It is astonishing. They want to do that while Americans are struggling to pay their bills. Americans shouldn't be paying the bills for millions of illegal immigrants. Joe Biden let 10 million of them into the country. We shouldn't be paying the bills for these fraud centers that they are allowing in Minnesota and what we see happening in California. The American people shouldn't have to be forced to be paying for that.
pockets of the American people. The American people earned it, and they rightly deserve it.
I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Recognition of the Minority Leader
The Democratic leader is recognized.
Artificial Intelligence
Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, well, Donald Trump is asleep at the wheel when it comes to reining in unchecked AI. Right after news came out over the weekend about rogue AI agents infiltrating government websites in the United States, Australia, and at the U.N., do you know what Trump told FOX News? “I don't worry about it.” Well, he is about the only one.
do, so do cyber security experts and even many of the people who are building this technology. Everybody who knows anything about it worries about rogue AI—not Donald Trump. He keeps his head in the sand like an ostrich. He doesn't pay any attention to the facts and just says whatever pops into his head, no matter how harmful it is.
today, he ought to stop resisting the growing consensus that we need real guardrails to mitigate AI's risk.
utter failure if they don't propose and start talking about and start to come to an agreement about some real guardrails that need to be done. And, of course, he should consult with those of us in Congress who believe we need stronger guardrails.
over and over and over again, won't protect the American people. The Senate GOP's response to AI risk has been almost as meek as Trump's.
all the Republicans offer is a toothless messaging bill. The bill is a fraud.
one word: optional. The bill is optional. America, do you hear that? Here, we need some real action on data centers. And what does the Republican Senator from Ohio come up with? Something that is optional. It is up to the companies to decide.
Well, they are the ones that need the guardrails: optional—optional requirements in his bill on data center development, optional standards for safety against catastrophic risks, optional enforcement to protect the American people. A guardrail that is optional isn't a guardrail at all.
Senate Republicans are trying to secure an ineffectual participation trophy before they skip town. Instead of trying to score cheap political points with hollow proposals, Senate Republicans need to work with us to take meaningful action that will actually contain these existential risks. They are not doing that, and the American people are in real danger because of their failure to act.
Stock Trading
Mr. President, on stock trading and voter ID, Senate Republicans continue to show the country they care more about playing partisan political games than stopping corruption. The Senate GOP has bucked a longstanding bipartisan effort to ban stock trading in Congress, which is what Congress should do.
Committee advanced a strong, commonsense, bipartisan bill to ban congressional stock trading, but Senate Republicans abandoned this effort. Too many of their Members didn't want to do it.
Congress, they wouldn't have let the House Republicans water down the ban. The bill Republicans are offering today is Swiss cheese legislating, creating loophole after loophole after loophole, and it is a step backward to solving this critical problem.
The bill even lets Members continue to own and sell stocks. The Republican bill even lets Members continue to own and sell stocks. This is the Republican MO. The public is mad about a problem. The public wants something done. And what they do is put in a bill that does virtually nothing because they want to try to assuage the public but not solve the problem because it affects them.
privately held companies to profit off their insider knowledge. So the bill makes things worse than present law because it would simply hide insider trading. It would not stop it.
would advance a bill that prohibits the President from trading stocks. We know that Trump has traded more stocks than all of Congress combined, but this bill does no such thing.
pass. They designed it that way. They don't want this bill to become law. So they put a poison pill in that they knew would tank it. It is really trickery. It is skulduggery.
Members, they wouldn't have loaded it up with a poison pill voter ID bill, which Senate Democrats have defeated already twice.
with the draconian voting restrictions that they attach to their stock trading bill. The voting restriction provisions in this bill are more severe than any law in any State—do you hear that?—more severe than any law in any State. They are designed to kill the bill.
they are fighting corruption, when all they really want is to score political points before they head home to campaign.
Trump Administration
Mr. President, on Trump propaganda, Donald Trump continues to cram his taxpayer-funded propaganda down the throats of the American people. In less than a single week, Trump has aired three campaign ads, costing at least $1.5 million, all paid for by—guess who—the American taxpayer.
for his political ads. Have you ever heard anything so egregious in terms of how our system is supposed to work?
corrupt, and egregious abuse of taxpayer dollars immediately. The Trump administration has a lot of questions it needs to answer: Who is responsible for these ads? Which Agency? Where were the funds diverted to pay for Trump's propaganda? Was Trump involved personally?
Trump was personally involved in pushing these campaign ads on the taxpayers' dime.
announcements. They were pure propaganda. After fawning over foreign authoritarians like Putin and Kim Jong Un for so long, Trump must have gotten jealous of their control over state TV.
efforts to rob the American people to fund his extravagant vanity projects. It is time for Republicans to either call the President out for this corruption or to call it quits in November.
Affordable Care Act
Mr. President, finally, on the Affordable Care Act CRA, well, today Senate Democrats will force consideration of a resolution to stop Trump from further sabotaging the ACA.
Trump's recent rule terminates coverage for 2 million Americans. It jacks up healthcare costs for millions more and gives big insurers carte blanche to force the American people to pay more for less.
this callous rule comes on the heels of Trump and Republicans ransacking over $1 trillion—$1 trillion—from the healthcare system, all to bankroll tax breaks for billionaires and big corporations.
coverage, and tens of millions of working Americans are watching their premiums double, triple, even quadruple.
to lower costs but, rather, kill the Affordable Care Act with a death by a thousand cuts.
protect the care their constituents rely on or they will continue to own every lost healthcare policy, every closed hospital, and every skyrocketing premium that follows.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Graham). The Senator from Virginia.
Artificial Intelligence
Mr. WARNER. Madam President, I think most of us in this Chamber realize that we are literally living through one of the most consequential technology moments in our lifetime, and that is why I am here with several of my colleagues—Senator Schatz from Hawaii and Senator Kim from New Jersey—to say that we can't, frankly, have regular business at this moment.
You know, before I got into politics, I was in the technology field. I was lucky enough to be on the ground floor of the wireless industry and then became a venture capitalist and was involved in iterations around the internet and cloud computing. I can say without reservation that as big as wireless was, as big as the internet is, as big as cloud computing is, they will pale in comparison to the innovation that will come about through artificial intelligence.
hire me one last time was because, having spent an enormous amount of time on this subject, I am enormously concerned that we get AI right, that it is safe and it is fair, that America leads in AI innovation.
subject repeatedly. I have laid out my ideas on how we ought to have a comprehensive approach—legislation on data centers that would actually, if they don't meet minimum Federal standards, would impose their inability to get a bonus tax depreciation.
safety. If you think social media messed up your kids, wait until your teenage daughter or son thinks they have an affinity or a relationship with a chatbot. How ironic that China has already prohibited that.
We are seeing increasingly the use of AI agents. Well, who bears the liability? I have some ideas there.
National security. When Mythos came out from Anthropic, our head of NSA and Cyber Command said that this tool will change warfare as much as drones.
create jobs long term, in the short run, in the next 2 to 5 years, I think we will have an enormous disruption in our workforce. I will make a wager with anyone that I hope I will lose that we could see up to 30 percent of recent college grad unemployment as companies try to integrate the productivity gains from AI, and they are simply not going to hire as many folks going forward.
So I remain an AI optimist. I am not an AI doomer. But we are at a moment in time, looking over the last few weeks, where I think the whole world has recognized that we have to do something.
When AI companies, one after another, come out and say “We have to elevate safety and put that first and foremost,” when OpenAI just yesterday said they are slowing the model on Astra, when Anthropic has said they are trying to build in more safety protocols—I think that is good, but are we really going to trust the industry to self-police on something that, if it goes beyond what is happening—and we have already seen not tens but literally thousands of examples where these models go beyond what humans want them to do, the most famous being the OpenAI Hugging example, where 3,000 bots jumped the sandbox fence, attacked another company, and then came back and attacked OpenAI. Literally, during that period, they communicated with each other, hid their intent from human beings, would sacrifice some of the bots for the greater cause, and we are doing nothing? That was July. In August, they had 10,000 bots collaborate.
aisle who I think are enormously concerned who said that we will all have time to debate all of our—I don't want to use the term my friend from Hawaii will use, but pet rocks—I hope he will use it again—and say that we all have great ideas here, but we should not miss the moment to put a safety protocol in place now.
incident—AI is already suspect by most Americans—we could actually see the stop of innovation if an AI tool took over a hospital or a water system. I am not an AI doomer, but the ability to have these AI agents take over and shut down part of the financial system is real. We should heed the call from the experts.
mandatory controls. I think you will see other large businesses say so as well. We need to make sure whatever safety board we put in place doesn't ensconce the already largest frontier labs.
Our request is really simple. It has been as pared down as possible. Before these models are released, they should be pretested to make sure, secondly, that the sandboxes where they do the testing have appropriate cyber protocols, that even before you start testing, there is at least a basic safety policy. And these companies welcome this. And God forbid we have an incident, we have to have an incident reporting mechanism. No more, no less.
We would house this at NIST. The safety board would have to include, obviously, where the expertise is—the frontier models. I actually think it would be good to have an international validator—somebody like the British—on it as well. They have an AI safety institute. We could actually guarantee to the rest of the world that our models are safe.
So let's not get involved—this is not a partisan issue. I think the chairman of the Commerce Committee is coming down. We have worked with him. We look forward to working with him further. But let's go ahead and put a statement in place that we in the U.S. Senate recognize the enormous upside of much AI, but there is also a downside.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, you know, this is about a couple of very simple questions. The first question is, Humans in control of technology or not? That is the first question.
aviation, where you say “Before this plane can take off, we have to certify to its safety,” don't really get at the fundamental problem because what we have is technology that is equivalent to a plane being able to take off on its own while it is still being built. So the question is first, Humans in control or not?
should this be voluntary or not? Do we trust—not any individual CEO or board of directors, but do we trust that companies that are rolling toward the biggest IPOs in human history will voluntarily regulate themselves as opposed to maximize the value of that IPO, maximize shareholder profit?
Democrats and Republicans don't always see the sort of level of regulation necessary on an eye-to-eye basis, but I think at some level, there are 100 of us who believe that when it comes to serious risk to public safety, that those should not be voluntary safety regimes. They should be mandatory. They should be Federal. It shouldn't be every legislature. It shouldn't be some announcement from a bunch of tech CEOs. It has to be in Federal statutory law.
Now, the third question is, Should we do this comprehensively or not?
The answer, in my view, is not—not right now. Here is why. We don't have the capacity to pass a very complicated law to deal with all of the societal and economic and human impacts of the AI revolution. We are not going to do that
with the House out of town. We are not going to do that with the Speaker of the House being sort of so skeptical of any policymaking in this space that he basically left town to avoid dealing with this. So what we have is the most modest but most serious proposal to take down the acute risk that we are being told by the labs and by AI safety experts and others really does exist.
We could have an argument about “Is it a 10-percent chance of a terrible thing happening or a 1-percent chance of a terrible thing happening? How much time do we have?” but I think nobody is disagreeing that the risk is nonzero of something terrible happening if we don't have a basic architecture of these labs having to not just test before they commercially upload something but to have a safety regime from the very beginning because, as we now have learned, this is a unique kind of product that could become dangerous even before it is released to the public.
Warner and I talk about our pet rocks—I have a bunch of bills in the AI space that are important. Of course, I think mine are the best. I am sure Senator Kim and Senator Warner think theirs are the best. But the point is, we are not going to come to a resolution on this. This bill is trying to thread that needle of being nonpartisan, on the level, not a setup, not designed as an electoral bludgeon but simply to try to take down the acute risk that is right in front of us.
to look the Commerce Committee chairman in the eye and say: There are no tricks or traps here. This is what we have come to conclude is the safest way forward in the very short run. It also doesn't preclude Senator Cruz and Leader Thune and Senator Klobuchar and others from legislating in this space because there is lots more to do, but right now, we are facing something rather precipitous.
down—that doesn't reduce to zero—but that takes down the risk of something really horrifying happening to people in the United States of America. So this is about humans in control, this is about keeping politics out of it, and this is about taking down the short-term risk of something really terrible happening.
election season, we tried like heck to display enough discipline on our own to not introduce a bunch of stuff that was going to freak a bunch of other people out. I actually haven't heard of any substantive disagreements with what we are proposing—I am sure they exist—but in terms of Member interaction, in terms of the expert community, in terms of my Republican colleagues, people aren't saying: I hate this bill. I have an ideological objection to it. It won't work.
They are not saying that.
And my judgment is that we don't have the luxury of time.
the hot liquid from the House to cool off, and then we can deliberate, right? Well, the House is out of town, and they did not send us anything to drink. So that is a lovely way to understand this body, but we are all that is left, and we have to work on a nonpartisan—forget bipartisan—on a nonpartisan basis to make sure that humans remain in control of the technology.
yield to my friend the junior Senator from New Jersey who knows more about national security and who is, I think, appropriately alarmed at the potential impacts of inaction in the U.S. Senate.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
Mr. KIM. Madam President, I thank my colleagues Senator Warner and Senator Schatz.
join us in this moment because this is a call from the American people to address their worries, to avoid disaster, and to give them a sense of stability and predictability.
of the problems; it is not going to avoid all of the pitfalls, but it is a start, and that is what the American people are looking for. They are looking for a start. They are looking for action that we are taking not just in words but in recognizing, yes, innovation without control just leads to chaos and leads to unpredictability. That is something that we need to make sure we are meeting at this moment to ensure that the American people have control over the incredible strides that we are seeing on AI.
Now, control can't be built on faith and half measures. Just yesterday, we saw again OpenAI saying that they are not going to release their newest model Astra because of security concerns. We have seen other major labs take some steps to mitigate. That is progress, but the stakes are too high for this to be just voluntary that big corporations take the right action just because it is the right thing to do.
conversation was, “What is the magnitude of the problem that we are facing?” and then to be able to work backward from there to understand what the magnitude is of the solution needed to actually address that problem.
and ask me—because I was talking about the Hugging Face incident or some of the other news that we had seen of rogue AI agents breaking out. This one constituent asked me, he said: Well, how many times has this happened? How many times? Are we documenting it? How many times have we actually seen this?
and we don't know how many of these types of instances have happened. I will be honest with you, I don't think the top AI companies fully know the total number of incidents and other challenges that they have faced.
So when they have the question: What is the magnitude of the problem we are trying to solve, the answer right now is that we don't know. That is scary, that is worrisome, and that is something we should work incredibly hard to be able to address.
improvement is going to magnify these problems? We don't know yet, which is why we are trying to set out, with the effort today, to recognize that the stakes are too high and that control comes from creating efforts like an AI safety board or in establishing more secure sandboxes for testing and other types of standards. Control is necessary because we need to ensure that the technology does not outpace safety and common sense.
again, to be, hopefully, working with all of our colleagues together on this shared agenda. That is what the American people are not just asking of us but are demanding of us to be able to do so that this bill can be part of a comprehensive approach that will help us maintain control and avoid the chaos that no American wants to see.
With that, I yield to the Senator from Virginia.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Virginia.
Unanimous Consent Request
Mr. WARNER. Madam President, in a moment, I am going to ask for a UC.
we don't know. What we do know is that the ChatGPT model that has already been released and is out in service has literally had thousands of times where it has gone beyond what the model was supposed to have done.
I completely don't think we can solve this State by State. Yesterday, Florida sued ChatGPT in kind of a very red State with a very Republican attorney general's taking, you know, an almost the-sky-is-falling approach.
moment—I have never seen an innovation that could be so positive but be viewed so negatively by the public at this point, particularly by young people. So we are just saying: Let's put a safety board in place. We have to recognize things where we don't empower the existing incumbents, but I think we can do that. We are saying: Release testing. Make sure the sandboxes are safe on cyber protocols. Make sure there is a safety protocol that goes back even before testing, and make sure, after—God forbid—an incident, that there is an incident report.
Again, I would echo what my colleagues have said. You know, I have not talked to a single Member on either side of the aisle who doesn't think we need to move. I don't think the option of simply relying on the good will of these companies will be enough.
work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle because I think there is, frankly, no issue more important. If we don't get safety rights and all of the things about workforce or agent liability or national security, which has to be dealt with, we may miss. That would be the worst. If Americans turn against this innovation and say: We are going to stop it across the board, nothing would be better for China, and we don't want that to happen.
the immediate consideration of the Artificial Intelligence Risk Management and Security Act, which is at the desk; further, that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
The Senator from Texas.
Mr. CRUZ. Madam President, in reserving the right to object, there is no doubt that AI will have profound effects on America's economy, national security, and culture. It is already having an enormous beneficial impact on economic growth and productivity. Millions of Americans are using AI for everyday tasks like handling home repairs, teaching their children math, conducting legal research, or using it to work to draft memos. It is incredibly useful, and it will only become more so.
intelligence hastily or in a closed manner. Robust AI legislation needs to involve both sides, and I trust that my Democratic friends who are on the floor today genuinely want to work together on this. I would note that with all three of the Democrat Senators on the floor, I have worked productively on other legislative matters, and I look forward to continuing to work productively on this matter as well which, I agree, is of exceptional importance.
having extensive and constructive conversations with Majority Leader Thune and Senator Klobuchar to give the government new authorities to protect against the potential catastrophic risks from AI. I think that is important.
artificial intelligence presents new challenges. Some of the warnings we have had are as scary as hell. I commend my colleagues for wanting to tackle the issue, but I retain real reservations about this specific proposal. This bill would let the executive branch handpick a new AI safety board to unilaterally draft standards for AI developers on whatever it believes is related to “national security, national economic security, or public health and safety.”
that AI developers then follow those standards. The Secretary would also exercise unilateral authority to change those standards based on national security. These terms are not bound by existing statutes or traditional legal doctrines or are even further defined. That concerns me because it is difficult to imagine what an ambitious bureaucrat couldn't shoehorn under this broad authority.
that do not offer such unbounded discretion to the Federal Government and that are not an invitation for abuse, approaches like involving independent judges, which preserves debate and transparency through the adversarial process of litigation. Federal standards on advanced AI must also address the burgeoning patchwork of State laws.
together. We need a bipartisan solution. AI offers enormous potential, and the question of who wins the race for AI, whether it is the United States or China, I believe is the single most important economic question facing America. The answer is that one or the other will win, and to whichever country wins, trillions of dollars of investment will follow as will millions of new jobs. I want those millions of new jobs to be here in America. I don't want them in China.
of that nation will suffuse AI. I do not want the world using an AI that is governed by the values of communist China, that is, governed by surveillance and espionage and propaganda and coercion and control. The Chinese communist Government wants to use AI to control its citizenry and to control everyone else. I am not interested in the American people being captive to that degree of power by the Chinese communist Government. I would far rather American values suffuse AI: free speech, individual liberty, free enterprise, individual rights. So winning the race for AI matters enormously.
Are there risks from AI? Of course. Any new tool has risks. I think we need guardrails particularly to protect against risks in the nuclear space with biohazards and critical infrastructure. Those are some of the most fundamental risks that we face.
should be bipartisan, and they should be measured and prudent. I don't believe we are there yet, although I am very happy to work with my colleagues constructively to get there and to get there in a bipartisan manner.
As of now, though, I object.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The objection is heard.
The Senator from Virginia.
Mr. WARNER. Madam President, I thank the Senator, and I look forward to working with him.
rubber hits the road. You have to acknowledge that the frontier model has got most of the expertise. I think we all share a deep commitment, and as the chair and vice chair of the Intelligence Committee for the last decade, I have been calling out the CCP and their approach to technology that is just not in AI but across the board.
going to look pretty darned silly if something happens, and the American people turn dramatically against this technology because we didn't put safety first. Literally, the commercial ChatGPT model out there has created thousands—and this is not my word; it is the ChatGPT management's—of incidences where it has gone beyond what it was supposed to do. Literally, almost all of the members of the Anthropic company have said this something we need to address.
We have to do this with urgency. I look forward to working with the chairman. We have got to make it mandatory. We have got to make it safe.
move very, very quickly. I am not sure that the traditional judicial process could move that way, but I thank the chairman.
I don't know if my colleagues wanted to have a closing note as well.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Hawaii.
Mr. SCHATZ. Madam President, I am mildly encouraged. I, obviously, would rather he not object, but I am encouraged by the potential for common ground here.
something that I personally don't have religion on. The question at hand is: Should we have some sort of mandatory safety and cyber security regime, and how do we stand up something that is quick enough to deal with the hastening pace of this technology and the
Look, I am always ready to modify something. If the Secretary of the Commerce Department shouldn't be the person in charge of determining the AI safety standards, that this should take 2 weeks rather than 6 months, you know, I am very openminded. But the threshold question is: Should this be voluntary or mandatory? And if you are saying you are open to some sort of mandatory regime with the caveats that you have expressed, I think that is progress.
I will make one final point. I think we get a little hung up on anthropomorphizing the tech itself, including this idea that the values are going to be imbued in the AI.
The AI gets given a task. It doesn't have ideas of its own. It doesn't have thoughts of its own. It doesn't have consciousness. It doesn't have feelings. And so this idea that we are going to have American, patriotic, liberty-loving AI and they are going to have the other kind I think is a misunderstanding of what we are actually talking about right now, which is we actually just want normal cyber security controls for this incredibly powerful tech. And the cyber security controls are going to have to be more robust than ever, but, like, that does not seem at all inconsistent with American values.
to allow a terrible incident to happen without any Federal guardrails, and then I think, figuratively speaking, the pitchforks will be coming.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
Mr. KIM. Madam President, I will be quick here. I just want to say I hope we can be able to take this step and continue to move on. And as someone who is on the Commerce Committee, wanted to find ways to be able to engage.
future, but I don't think that that competition, especially vis-a-vis China, is mutually exclusive with the need to be able to engage with safety and security.
like the MATCH Act, that are about us being able to further strengthen our innovative lead, and I hope that this body does take those measures up, as we have them before us in this very Congress. Within the end of the year, we can move forward on those types of steps.
States. It is not just about China. It is about our ability to proliferate this technology all over the world. And whether or not all of these other countries are going to be choosing our technology or someone else's is going to depend on its performance and whether or not it carries risk.
people that we have something safe and secure, it is about a product that we hope the rest of the world will very much engage on and be using and driving American innovation as well as American prosperity going forward. So that is something that, again, I hope we can work on together.
I yield the floor.
Mr. WARNER. I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Indiana.