Codifying the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource and establishing an AI select committee are among the top priorities this Congress for the House Republican who co-chaired the chamber’s task force last year on the emerging technology.
During a fireside chat Tuesday at the State of the Net conference in Washington, D.C., Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., said he plans to reintroduce the Creating Resources for Every American to Experiment with Artificial Intelligence Act of 2023 — better known as the CREATE Act — and he is “cautiously optimistic” about the prospects of the bill to establish the NAIRR.
Obernolte also said he is pushing Congress to form an AI select committee, a logical next step to the House AI task force, which the California Republican co-chaired. The task force wrapped its work last year with the release of a final report in December.
On the sidelines of Tuesday’s event, Obernolte told FedScoop that when it comes to the CREATE ACT, he’s “trying to make it more clear to my colleagues that the vast majority of the compute and the data is going to be donated. What we’re providing is a federal framework for managing that.”
“I think there was fear that taxpayer resources were going to be used to fund this compute, and that’s not necessary,” he continued. “We have such a huge outpouring of donations from industry who are also eager to see this get created.”
Legislation to codify the NAIRR, a shared research infrastructure for AI that operates in a pilot format through the National Science Foundation, moved out of committee floors in both the House and the Senate last Congress, but ultimately did not make it across the finish line.
The resource was originally established in former President Joe Biden’s AI executive order, though its future remains uncertain with the Trump administration’s recall of the directive.
Amid that uncertainty, Obernolte remains hopeful that the House AI task force’s final report — which detailed recommendations to Congress on how to handle the surge in AI tools in legislative activities — is only the beginning of the chamber’s work on the technology. He said he’s “very much convinced” that there is still a need for a group of people that are “dedicated to action on this issue,” voicing the need to have a place to launch legislation that implements the recommended steps that the task force laid out.
But Obernolte said he and others who support that approach are facing pushback from existing policy committees. Regardless of whether the prospective AI select committee introduces legislation that gets referred out to different policy committees, Obernolte said he believes “we need a nucleus to get [the committee] launched.”
There are ongoing discussions about what the task force or its select committee successor will look like this year, but Obernolte told FedScoop that details regarding any proposed committee haven’t been established and that he and others are still at the “30,000-foot view.”
“We just need to make sure that we have some kind of nucleus,” Obernolte said. “I don’t know if it’s a working group or task force or a select committee, but I think it’s really important that we have a group of people who are focused on this task.”
