House Democratic Caucus Vice Chair Ted Lieu hammered a bipartisan AI framework Tuesday, saying the proposal his colleagues introduced last week “cannot meet the enormity of the moment.”
Lieu, who is also one of three members on an AI commission convened by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, said at his weekly news conference that the regulatory blueprint championed by his fellow Californian, Republican Rep. Jay Obernolte — and Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) — “was not something that would work, because there’s a lot of issues it does not cover.”
Lieu said he welcomes other House Democrats to engage on the topic, but suggested that Trahan and Obernolte had failed to win over adequate support to make their framework politically viable. Their 269-page draft bill would, among other things, override some state AI laws, drawing attacks from many House Democrats and safety advocates.
“In Congress you have to build a consensus, you actually have to get groups and members of Congress and organizations to support what you’re trying to do,” Lieu added. “The particular framework that was released last week got intense pushback from the civil rights community, the labor community, AI safety folks — and so you know, if we’re to get something done, we need to build consensus and build a coalition, and that’s the first step that needs that.”
His unsparing comments are a blow not only to efforts to find common ground on a thorny policy matter, but also expose deeper rifts among Democrats as the party has struggled to coalesce around a unified vision for how to regulate the emerging technology.
Trahan has said she jumped into AI negotiations with Republicans because she is worried about mass economic and humanitarian disruption from Anthropic’s Mythos model, necessitating quick legislative action and cross-party dealmaking. Lieu said he is well aware of the urgency to produce a framework to regulate AI, insisting his commission would roll out its own proposal by the end of the year.
“Shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT to the world, I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times that was titled, essentially, ‘AI freaks me out,’” Lieu said. “I am well aware of the urgency, many people are well aware of the urgency, so it’s not lost on the people working on this issue that we need to urgently get something done.”
