Mariam Baksh

Republicans have won a Senate majority and will vote within their conference on the chairmanships of key committees that have been active on artificial intelligence issues under the outgoing Democratic leadership.

Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has won re-election and is likely to secure the gavel of the Senate Commerce Committee, where he has opposed regulatory efforts on artificial intelligence and is sponsoring legislation that would block initiatives to mitigate the risk of discrimination by AI systems.

Maureen Ohlhausen, a Republican former Federal Trade Commission member and acting chair, expects the new Trump administration to ease off efforts to enforce antitrust laws against major developers of artificial intelligence technology, in the interest of national security.

President-elect Trump and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) -- his pick to run the State Department -- might agree on a need to address the use of artificial intelligence in curating political speech, but an industry-backed think tank says the senator's efforts to hold tech companies liable are likely to be frustrated by Trump's personal interests.

Policy analysts at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology expect progress on the governance of artificial intelligence to come mostly from industry-driven standards development processes and are encouraging stakeholder engagement across the world, including with China.

Consumer rights advocates at Public Knowledge told the Department of Energy there might be a need to limit access to some artificial intelligence models, but emphasized that should not translate into blanket restrictions on AI model weights or open-source systems.

Legislation proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) -- criticized by some as a controversial attack on foundational civil rights law -- was a proportional reaction to President Biden's unprecedented executive order on artificial intelligence, according to a prominent free-market advocate in the tech space who is welcoming the EO's impending reversal.

Many of the chief advocates of openness in artificial intelligence systems shared their plans for reframing global governance efforts related to safety at a meeting ahead of next year's global AI “action summit” in Paris.

U.S. policymakers should adopt the European Union's tack of considering the application of artificial intelligence for drug discovery a low-risk use case, according to a report from the Information Technology Innovation Foundation.

Certain applications of artificial intelligence -- including those for law enforcement -- should be strictly prohibited while others can be responsibly managed under a risk-based approach, according to Texas state Rep. Giovanni Capriglione (R).