Ranking Member Cantwell Opening Statement at Today’s Hearing on the White House AI Action Plan

[VIDEO]

U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, delivered the following opening statement during today's Subcommittee on Science, Manufacturing, and Competitiveness hearing on the White House AI Action Plan.

"Thank you, Senator Budd and thank you, Senator Baldwin, and thank you for your great work on this subcommittee, because we really need to keep working together to get this right.

"Director Kratsios, great to see you here. Thank you for your leadership, and I enjoyed our conversation and the follow up material that you sent - very, very helpful and illuminating as we continue to struggle through how the United States of America maintains our leadership in AI and yet also faces the challenges that we face around the globe.

"I want to, first of all, just thank everybody on this committee who worked in a bipartisan effort to get, I think, seven different bills out of the committee, unfortunately they were held up and it's good to see the [Action Plan] goes down that same list of issues: education; training; trying to build capacity; trying to streamline, both with NIST and the rest of OSTP, how we can continue to move forward in a very fast way.

"I come from a very innovative part of the United States. I think probably [the] largest data center that exists in the United States by capacity is in the Pacific Northwest. I think the cheapest rate [for] data centers is also in the Pacific Northwest, at Quincy, Washington, because of the low-cost public power. So I do want to, when we get to the Q and A, ask you about that part of the Executive Order, because in the Executive Order, you say: [O]ne of the urgencies that we have as a nation is if we want to be the leader in AI, we have to be the leader in our energy capacity to build data centers and maximize that.

"I also want to ask you, too, about yesterday's events. Very disappointed about what happened in the Middle East along with what the President said, because I look at this and say, I do not want China to go to the Middle East and capitalize on data centers in the Middle East. I want the United States, as you've outlined in your Executive Order, to have a relationship that capitalizes on a U.S. export stack and the ability for us to promulgate. It's kind of like an operating system. It's like the best of our technology being adopted in an international framework. And I'd like to really see that.

"I definitely want to see that, you know, I've called it a Tech NATO, where the best of the products and the export capabilities of the United States help us create standards around the United States and the world, but it also helps stop bad actors who may not have the same standards or may not have the same securities that we have in our system. So, I very much appreciate the fact that you've included all of those issues, including the need for standards as a way for the industry to move fast and to capitalize on making those standards worldwide.

"I do very much support…[as] you have in the executive order, ways to think about next generation energy as well. We're very proud of what we're doing in fusion technology. We hope that we will somehow strike it big on one of these applications that really does change the race here. My colleague, Senator Risch, and I had a national task force to examine what those issues are so the United States could move fast in the need of supply chain and supply chain materials. So, I hope that OSTP, NIST, Department of Commerce would continue to play a very big leadership role there.

"So again, thank you so much for being here. Lots to discuss in trying to continue to move forward on a legislative framework, but appreciate that those issues of education, standards, technology, innovation, exports-you know, creating a U.S. framework that is adopted globally-is the direction that we need to go. And I very much appreciate, as I said, my colleagues continued efforts to push the legislation that we have done in a bipartisan fashion. So, thank you."

A transcript of Sen. Cantwell's Q&A is available HERE. Video of her opening remarks is HERE and of her Q&A is HERE.

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