Lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee grappled with how antitrust regulators should approach the artificial intelligence industry Wednesday, with Republicans and industry advocates warning that heavy-handed enforcement could thwart America's lead in the industry and Democrats wondering what had changed from when AI leaders sought more governmental guardrails.
In a hearing in front of the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, industry group executives described an AI sector rife with competition and disruptive startups not in need of additional competition enforcement. Joseph Coniglio, the Innovation, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation's antitrust director, even suggested that AI itself could help to stifle the growth of any monopoly power in the industry.
"In my view, AI provides no reason at this time for either heavy-handed antitrust enforcement or changing, fundamentally, our antitrust laws," Coniglio testified. "The AI industry is highly competitive in developing in a way that is consistent with the healthy innovation and competition typified in high-tech markets."
Republicans in the committee's majority largely agreed, claiming that America's relatively lax regulatory regime in AI had resulted in so many global industry leaders being built domestically. But a number of Democrats argued that the technology's threats to workers — both in terms of their job security and intellectual property — and data privacy should be met with clear-eyed regulation that wouldn't have to curtail innovation.
Democrats at the hearing also rallied around Alvaro Bedoya, a
Federal Trade Commission member whom President Donald Trump has
moved to fire in a purge of the agency's Democratic minority.
Bedoya stayed away from discussing his own limbo on the commission Wednesday, but described various real-world scenarios involving the technology that have already played out and may run afoul of antitrust and privacy law, like film and television companies taking full-body scans of extras to insert in future scenes without pay, or the collection of children's voice data through
Amazon's Alexa units in order to train voice recognition algorithms.
He also said deals between major AI developers and cloud providers could be squeezing out the very startups that the industry's advocates told the committee were reinforcing natural competition in the market. Just before Trump's inauguration, the FTC issued a
staff report detailing three such agreements.
"The report showed that cloud providers typically got the things you'd expect: equity [and] a share of revenue from those AI developers. The agreements also require the AI developers to spend a lot of the investment from the cloud provider on cloud services from the cloud provider," he said. "Unfortunately, these kinds of terms may be incentivizing those cloud providers to limit access to their platforms away from AI startups who they're not partnered with. And unfortunately, this is not hypothetical."
Rep. Ben Cline, R-Va., said that Democrats were holding a regulatory hammer and seeing everything "as a nail." He teed up another of the committee's witnesses Wednesday, Jessica Melugin, director for technology of the
Competitive Enterprise Institute, to explain the risks of a "heavy-handed" enforcement approach.
Melugin said that if developers are "distracted" by "regulatory hurdles and legal concerns," it would take resources away from "turning out the best products" — and could lead much of the world to turn to Chinese products instead.
"I don't think most Americans are looking for AI to be really, really regulated," she said. "I think they're looking for AI to be really, really prosperous and successful."
However, Cline also pressed Melugin — whose organization is, according to the Capital Research Center, partly funded by some of the biggest technology companies in the world — on potential job losses from AI proliferation and the exploitation of intellectual property in the training of AI models.
Melugin said that some jobs will undoubtedly be replaced by AI, but that technology obviating certain jobs "has been happening since the dawn of time" and "it's not worth holding an entire country back in the kind of technology that will benefit every single American and people around the globe, hopefully."
On intellectual property, she said that the industry was already innovating ways to train models on "synthetic data" to avoid issues implicating IP law, but that there are "trade-offs" for innovation.
Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., noted that just a few years prior, the biggest names in AI were on Capitol Hill
asking to be regulated. Johnson quoted Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, who said "AI could go quite wrong" and that he wanted to "work with the government to prevent that from happening."
"For two years, the tech industry, AI creators have been wanting regulation. But now we have a group of three lobbyists up here requesting that we not apply any regulation," Johnson said Wednesday. "What has changed?"
--Editing by Alanna Weissman.
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