With the House officially joining the Senate in Washington on Tuesday, both chambers of Congress are back in session for the first time in more than a month – with a lot on their plate. 

Yet, even amid negotiations to avert a looming government shutdown before Sept. 30, which Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., recently called “a pretty big mess,” as well as a newly announced House GOP impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, there is another topic taking on a starring role in D.C. this week: artificial intelligence. 

What You Need To Know

  • Amid a government funding fight and an impeachment inquiry, lawmakers in Washington are shining a spotlight on artificial intelligence this week 

  • Congressional committees are holding multiple hearings on the rapidly growing field over the next few days, culminating in some of the most powerful and best-known names in technology making their way to Capitol Hill for a closed-door Senate meeting on Wednesday 

  • The White House kicked off the AI-focused week Tuesday morning, announcing it secured commitments from eight new technology companies to follow a set of voluntary safeguards 

Congressional committees are holding multiple hearings on the rapidly growing field over the next few days, culminating in some of the most powerful and best-known names in technology making their way to Capitol Hill for a closed-door Senate meeting that the chamber’s Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called “one of the most important conversations of the year.” 

On the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House kicked off the AI-focused week Tuesday morning, announcing it secured commitments from eight new technology companies to follow a set of voluntary safeguards. 

Those include steps to ensure the products are safe before introducing them to the public, investing in cybersecurity, reporting vulnerabilities in systems and seeking to earn people’s trust by implementing things such as a watermarking system and publicly releasing reports. 

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients are convening industry leaders at the White House on Tuesday to discuss the new companies’ commitments to join in on the voluntary rules. Those companies include Adobe, Cohere, IBM, Nvidia, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI, and Stability. 

In July, the president announced the first seven companies agreeing to take part in this effort with the White House. Those companies included some of the world’s most recognizable tech giants: Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft. ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and startups Anthropic and Inflection also signed on. 

Also on Tuesday, the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation committee is holding a hearing on transparency when it comes to AI at the same time the Senate Judiciary committee is holding one focused on legislating on the evolving technology. Thursday will see Biden administration officials from the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security and White House Office of Science and Technology Policy take the Hill to offer testimony to the House Oversight and Accountability committee during its hearing. 

But Wednesday is when the Senate will hear from some of the industry’s heaviest hitters. Multiple outlets have reported that X’s Elon Musk, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella will be among the technology leaders to brief senators. 

Speaking on the Senate floor on Tuesday, Schumer added that representatives from labor and civil rights organizations will also join Wednesday’s meeting, where the group will discuss “how and why Congress must act, what questions to ask and how to build a consensus for safe innovation.” 

Schumer is billing the forum as “the first of many” that will be held this fall as lawmakers grapple with whether and how to regulate the field. 

“In past situations when subjects like this that are so complex and difficult come forward, too many Congresses have tended to behave reactively or favored delaying action until it is too late,” Schumer said on Tuesday. “But on AI, we cannot behave like ostriches and stick our heads in the sand.”

Both the White House and Congress have ramped up attention on artificial intelligence in recent months, with Biden often pointing to the “enormous promise and risks” the field brings. 

The president convened industry leaders to talk AI in San Francisco in June after hosting tech CEOs to discuss the topic at the White House in May. 

His administration also developed a blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and is expected to release a set of actions the government can take to help ensure safe development of AI systems. 

Altman also added attention and urgency to the issue in Washington when he testified about the technology at a Senate hearing in May.

Since then, several lawmakers have taken steps to introduce legislation on the topic. 

In June, for instance, Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Ken Buck, R-Colo., introduced a bipartisan bill that would create a commission to discuss the current approach to AI, make recommendations moving forward and develop a response framework.

Just this month, Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., released their own bipartisan framework for AI. Schumer also released his own AI policy framework earlier this summer.