Hearing Wrap Up: The U.S. Must Develop and Advance Artificial Intelligence to Dominate the Tech Race

WASHINGTON-Yesterday, the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology, and Government Innovation held a hearing titled "Shaping Tomorrow: The Future of Artificial Intelligence." During the hearing, members assessed the current state of artificial intelligence (AI) and its growing impact on the U.S. economy. Members also heard from witnesses on how American companies are shaping the AI landscape on the global stage and explored predictions about future developments in AI and how that will alter the function of the economy and the workforce.

Key Takeaways:

From health care to transportation to agriculture, AI is revolutionizing industries to improve outcomes and efficiency.

• Kinsey Fabrizio, President of Consumer Technology Association, testified that "We see AI and digital twins that can simulate everything from factories to city planning. Agentic AI, which are autonomous systems that can manage everyday tasks. Vertical AI models, which are specialized in areas like healthcare and mobility or agriculture. Industrial AI, which is augmenting the workforce and improving safety. And physical AI, which includes more lifelike and useful robots."

American companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI are competing for dominance with increasingly sophisticated frontier language models.

• Samuel Hammond, Chief Economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, testified that "The AI Research Organization Meter carefully measures progress in AI autonomy, and has found that the length of tasks that agents can perform doubles roughly every four to seven months, a trend that has held for the past six years. When the earliest chatbots could only perform tasks measured in seconds or minutes, OpenAI's latest model, GPT 5, can coherently execute tasks that take human engineers two hours and 17 minutes on average. If this trend continues, we are only two doublings away, roughly eight to 14 months, from AI agents that can autonomously perform tasks that take humans a full eight-hour workday."

Congress must examine the current state of AI explore predictions about future developments to maintain global dominance in the technology race.

• Ms. Fabrizio testified that "American companies are leading the AI race, but their success is not guaranteed. In China, the government has made AI central to its national strategy and invested heavily in areas like semiconductors, robots and data centers. To counter this strategy, we need policies that help American companies out-innovate the competition. If America falters in AI, we risk ceding entire industries, supply chains, and influence over global standards."
  
• Mr. Hammond testified that "Even within the bounds of existing infrastructure, and is coming sooner than many realize, it's worth emphasizing that creating [artificial general intelligence] and superintelligent AI capable of outperforming humans in every domain is the explicit goal of every leading us AI company. While some dismiss this as science fiction or marketing hype, I assure you the leaders of these companies are deadly serious. As for timing, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark testified recently that he expects transformative AI to arrive as soon as the end of 2026 or early 2027. Even if these forecasts are on trend, AI capabilities will remain uneven for at least several more years. For a brief, paradoxical moment, we will have superintelligent AIs that can prove new math theorems but still struggle to do many things that humans find trivial."
• The U.S. should focus on the responsible growth of AI to remain dominant in the global technology race.

Member Highlights:

Subcommittee Chairwoman Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) inquired about the balance between states' rights and a ten-year moratorium on AI, as well as competition with China in the race to develop AI.

Subcommittee Chairwoman Mace: "[Ms. Fabrizio], you talked about the ten-year moratorium for states. Why is it so important, you know, the states' rights thing has to be balanced? But also we don't want to stifle innovation. We know China, Russia, Iran-they're not they don't have any guardrails. They don't care. Talk about that a little bit."

Ms. Fabrizio: "Yeah. Well, you said it. China doesn't have that. And it's impossible for our member companies. Like I said, we have 80 percent small businesses, and they cannot compete and understand when there are a thousand different potential laws that they have to comply to. It just stifles innovation completely. And for us to win the AI race, we need to remove that barrier."

Subcommittee Chairwoman Mace: "And it is a federal issue because it's commerce across state lines. And having all those that regulatory environment that's a patchwork. And every state does make it very difficult to operate. And then, Mr. Hammond, one thing that struck me in your testimony, you're talking about compute energy. Talk to me a little bit more about that. Let's go into detail, because I agree with you. It's a huge problem. How do we solve it?"

Mr. Hammond: "It's a great question. So, you know, there's only a handful of inputs that go into training and competing at the frontier of these models. There's the data, the human talent, the compute and the energy. With China, we're basically at parity with talent, with data that may have advantages because they don't have privacy laws.

Subcommittee Chairwoman Mace: "They've stolen a bunch of our data."

Mr. Hammond: "Of course, and they also steal data and [intellectual property]. And so, really it comes down to hardware and energy. China has added over 400 gigawatts to the grid last year. They're about to do the same thing this year."

Subcommittee Chairwoman Mace: "How much have we added to our grid?"

Mr. Hammond: "Approximately zero. I mean, we've removed coal and added renewables and that has canceled out. And so, what that means is in lieu, but for these export controls that are barring China from our most advanced hardware, they would surely leapfrog us within a matter of years."

Rep. John McGuire (R-Va.) inquired about AI's potential role in updating the U.S. energy grid to compete with China.

Rep. McGuire: "Yesterday, I asked an AI chat box, how many acres of solar panels would you need to power AI in the U.S. by 2030? Anyone take a guess how much that would be? A thousand acres? Actually, let me see here. It's way more than a thousand acres. It's 500,000 acres. That's half the size of Delaware. We should be investing in fossil fuels and nuclear. Small modular nuclear reactors. As we discussed earlier, we only need 500 acres to do the same job nationally. By 2030, we should be using coal, natural gas, traditional nuclear power until [small nuclear reactors] are ready, not solar panels. All right. So let me ask this question. Is China building thousands of solar farms to power their AI? Yes, or no?"

Ms. Fabrizio: "China is looking at energy in different ways than we are, but there are solutions that we can look at to modernize our energy grid. And AI will help. AI will help develop solutions and help us be smarter about the future."

Rep. McGuire: "Mr. Hammond?"

Mr. Hammond: "Both. They added over 30 new coal plants while also adding 300 gigawatts of renewable [energy]."

Rep. McGuire: "Mr. Hammond and Ms. Fabrizio, what are some of the ways AI superintelligence might actually help us solve the energy problem?"

Mr. Hammond: "Well, when it comes to research and data and looking for solutions, AI is faster and can help predict different models and find different solutions where we may not be able to find them on our own."

Ms. Fabrizio: "I believe we're a year or two away from having fully autonomous AI labs that could discover new materials, new energy sources, all the above."

Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.) inquired about Americans' discernment of inflammatory speech misinformation spread by Chinese and Russian AI, balancing the expanded use of AI with preparing young Americans for the workforce, and recommendations for what Congress can do to monitor and regulate AI.

Rep. Crane: "How should the American people be wary of the increase of inflammatory speech following the assassination of Charlie [Kirk] and other mass violent events from Chinese and Russian bots?

Mr. Hammond: "It is a really big open challenge. These social media platforms have their work cut out for them. We do not yet have a reliable means of identifying what is a bot, what isn't, especially as these systems become more and more human-like in the way they speak. And so, I think it's something we need to put [many] more resources into."

Rep. Crane: "Okay. What do you think federal agencies should be doing to prevent the spreading of misinformation by these bots to sow discourse in our communities, in our country?"

Mr. Hammond: "I mean, at a minimum, we should stop selling China and Russia the technology they used to run those bots. You know, we these H20 chips which just got approved or liable to be approved for export to China. If they all go through, it's going to roughly double their data center capacity for running advanced AI models. We know from the past that they've used these chips to power their surveillance drones, to power their gait recognition technology. So, we've given them the ammunition that they're using on us."

Rep. Crane: "Okay. Next question for you, sir. When I was growing up in school, it was often considered cheating to use a calculator on a test. Right now, we have CEOs of Fortune 500 companies basically telling their employees that they need to be using AI a few times a day, or they'll be falling behind or become obsolete. My question is, how do we balance the expanded use of AI and not demonize the use of AI while preparing our students for the future?"

Mr. Hammond: "I think education is a good example of how AI is going to force a massive rethink and reckoning in how we do a lot of things, including how we design curriculum for K-12. And, you know, there's going to be resistance, but there's already new models that are emerging. So, there's Alpha School in Austin [Texas], which is trialing, running, you know, AI-assisted tutoring in the mornings and project-based learning in the afternoons and seeing tremendous results. And so, I think we just need much more innovation in how we how we do education."

Rep. Crane: "What advice for this committee and for Congress do you have in regards to any regulations that you think are responsible regarding AI in the future?"

Mr. Hammond: "My three big bullet points are: One, we need to monitor the frontier. So, we need to know what's coming and be able to prepare and adapt, because it's going to be a very fast-moving period of human history. So, you know, we don't want the government to be the last one to know. Number two is we need to be investing in research and development, especially around issues like control and interpretability. How do we interpret how these models work? How do we understand their behavior? How do we control their behavior? Still the [AI] companies are under-investing in that. And then third, we need to protect our comparative advantage, which is AI hardware. So, as I mentioned earlier, our one big advantage is chips and hardware. China is trying to catch up, but they are cut off right now. And if we open up those chips to China, they're going to jump ahead."

Click here to watch the hearing.