Amazon Executive Says Government Regulation of AI Could Limit Progress

The chief security officer for Amazon and AWS, Steve Schmidt, told Bloomberg News Tuesday (June 10) that government involvement in artificial intelligence (AI) could limit the scope of the company’s work in that field.

“The tension with regulation of any kind is that it tends to retard progress,” Schmidt said, per the report. “So the way we tend to focus on standards is to let the industry figure out what the right standards are, and that will be driven by our customers.”

Schmidt’s comments came at a time when the parliamentarian of the U.S. Senate is set to consider whether a provision forbidding states from enforcing new AI rules can remain in President Donald Trump’s tax package, according to the report.

Senate rules allow tax packages to include only language that is budgetary in nature, so the Senate has proposed language that would deny federal funding for broadband internet projects to states that enforce AI regulations, the report said.

Earlier, Trump rescinded the Biden administration’s executive order on AI, per the report.

Trump repealed Biden’s AI regulations on his first day in office, marking a policy shift that is lighter on regulations and guardrails and more pro-growth and pro-innovation, PYMNTS reported Jan. 22.

Biden’s executive order would have required the federal government to vet the advanced AI models of major developers such as Amazon, OpenAI, Google and other tech giants. It also established chief AI officers in major federal agencies and set out frameworks that addressed ethical and security risks.

The proposed 10-year freeze on state-level regulation of AI that is included in the tax and spending bill includes carveouts for state measures that “remove legal impediments” or “facilitate the deployment or operation” of AI systems, as well as laws that “streamline licensing, permitting, routing, zoning, procurement or reporting procedures,” PYMNTS reported May 21.

It would also allow state laws that do not impose any substantive “design, performance, data-handling, documentation, civil liability, taxation, fee or other requirement” on AI systems.

Tech industry leaders argue that a national framework is needed to avoid a patchwork of conflicting rules, while critics of preemption say Congress has failed to pass meaningful legislation on AI, leaving states to fill the gap.