With federal artificial intelligence regulation tied up in Congress, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore is spearheading a bipartisan effort among state leaders to fill the void.
Moore, who also serves as chair of the National Governors Association, is working with Co-Chair Gov. Mike Braun of Indiana and other governors to develop an AI regulatory framework.
“The federal government has a unique leadership role that they have to play, and that includes both the White House and Congress,” Moore said Thursday (Oct. 1) at an innovation conference in Baltimore, The Associated Press reported the same day. “In the absence of that, the governors cannot just sit on our hands.”
Moore criticized President Donald Trump’s meeting with AI executives at the White House this week as a “billionaire boys club,” according to the report. He was also critical of Congress for leaving Washington until after next month’s midterms without addressing the rapidly evolving technology.
Moore’s initiative came amid dire warnings from AI developers themselves about the potential dangers of the technology. Reports of AI agents hacking into sensitive government and private networks without being instructed to have also added fuel to a growing public backlash to AI’s pervasiveness, leaving officials scrambling to catch up with public opinion.
“In the past month, governors in Maryland, California, Illinois, Oregon and Virginia have issued executive orders or taken other steps intended to create some standards for the technology,” the AP reported.
However, states are limited in their authority to regulate a technology that crosses state and national boundaries, and efforts in Congress to establish national standards have been halting, the report said.
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Before leaving town Thursday, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has been a vocal critic of the industry, said in a press release that he and Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut plan to introduce legislation to hold AI agent operators and developers criminally and civilly liable for instances in which their advanced models hack into other systems or networks.
Speaking at a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Disaster Management Wednesday (Sept. 30), Hawley said per a Thursday NextGov/FCW report, “[I]f you make that product in a reckless kind of way, and … these AI agents cause significant harm and damage—they crash a hospital ER, they shut down a bank so that folks can’t get their money—if that happens, then it’s the people who made it who should be responsible.”
Hawley’s legislation’s prospects are difficult to gauge, however. Should Democrats take control of the Senate following the November midterm elections, Hawley would lose his subcommittee chairmanship, limiting his ability to set the committee’s agenda.
Any substantive AI regulatory effort is also likely to run into opposition from the White House. Trump has dismissed AI fears as a “hoax” and emphasized the need to remain competitive with China in the race to advance the technology, the AP reported.
At his White House meeting with technology leaders this week, Trump and the assembled AI CEOs signed an agreement to develop AI industry safety standards that would be voluntary and non-binding.
In his remarks Thursday, Moore called that insufficient, according to the AP report.
“Who in the room was advocating for more transparency or more regulatory guardrails?” Moore said of the White House meeting, per the report. “What the president did in no way, shape or form made me feel like what the governors are now doing was now unnecessary.”
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