US House Panel Examines AI’s Rapid Advances, Risks and Impacts

Lawmakers gathered on Capitol Hill on Wednesday (Sept. 17) for a wide-ranging hearing on artificial intelligence (AI), weighing its promise for innovation against risks to jobs, privacy and national security.

The session, held by the House Oversight Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation, brought testimony from industry and policy experts on how the U.S. should approach the technology’s rapid advance.

Innovation Opportunities and Risks

Committee leaders emphasized both optimism and caution. Chairwoman Nancy Mace, R-S.C., likened the competition for AI leadership to past technological races in space and nuclear energy, saying U.S. firms are “pushing the boundaries” of what is possible, from healthcare breakthroughs to smarter transportation and agriculture systems.

Ranking Member Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, stressed the need for “responsible and trustworthy use,” warning that without safeguards, automation could deepen inequities and leave workers behind.

Witnesses echoed the dual nature of AI’s trajectory. Kinsey Fabrizio, president of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), described AI as already integrated into everyday life, from medical devices to autonomous farm equipment.

At scale, she said, AI offers “the next great American growth engine” but argued that fragmented state-level regulation risks stifling small innovators. CTA is urging Congress to develop a federal framework and privacy law to give businesses clearer rules of the road.

PYMNTS has reported similar concerns from FinTech and banking executives, who say overlapping state and federal regulatory requirements increase compliance burdens and slow adoption of AI in areas such as fraud detection and credit underwriting.

Speed of Technological Change

Samuel Hammond, chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, focused on the pace of AI capabilities. Large language models, he noted, have leapt from basic text generation to advanced reasoning in just a few years. OpenAI’s latest system can now autonomously perform tasks requiring more than two hours of human engineering effort, with the length of tasks doubling every four to seven months.

Hammond warned of recursive self-improvement. AIs that help design their own successors could soon accelerate research and development cycles.

“It is now plausible that we will have the first superintelligent AI scientists and mathematicians by the year’s end,” he said, though bottlenecks such as computing power and energy supply may slow progress.

Equity, Workforce and Guardrails

Nicol Turner-Lee, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, stressed consumer protection and workforce readiness. She highlighted risks of bias in hiring systems and rising scams using AI-generated voice cloning. Turner-Lee called for stronger federal privacy protections, human oversight requirements, and audits of automated decision-making.

On jobs, witnesses diverged on timing and impact. Fabrizio pointed to new opportunities in STEM and apprenticeships, while Hammond suggested short-term adaptation may be easier for some workers than expected, citing demand spikes in trades supporting data centers, such as electricians and HVAC specialists. Turner-Lee cautioned that displacement could disproportionately hit unionized and frontline roles, urging “national AI literacy” to prepare workers for shifting tasks.

Recent PYMNTS research found that nearly half of U.S. workers expect AI to change their roles within five years, reflecting both anxiety and cautious optimism across industries

Global Competition and Policy Choices

The panel repeatedly returned to competition with China. Witnesses described Beijing’s heavy investment in semiconductors, robotics and data centers. Fabrizio said that the U.S. cannot risk falling behind in AI, or it might give opportunity for the rise of entire industries and supply chains abroad.

PYMNTS has reported that U.S. lawmakers are weighing a national AI framework to preempt conflicting state rules. Turner-Lee cautioned, however, that federal policy should not come at the expense of consumer protections at the state level, where attorneys general are experimenting with measures to curb fraud and misuse. She framed the challenge as balancing leadership abroad with fairness and safety at home.

The hearing underscored the stakes: maintaining U.S. leadership in AI while managing risks that range from job loss to national security threats. Witnesses agreed that regulation should be flexible enough to encourage innovation, but comprehensive enough to build public trust.

As Mace concluded, “When we get this right, we’ll ensure artificial intelligence fulfills its extraordinary promise.”