Congress and tech seem open to regulating AI efforts, but that doesn’t mean it will happen

U.S. senators and tech executives seemed open Tuesday to regulating the exploding field of artificial intelligence, but after Congress has failed to act when presented with multiple opportunities to rein in technology, don’t bet on it actually happening.

At a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Tuesday called “Oversight for AI,” senators heard testimony from Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, which created ChatGPT; Christina Montgomery, privacy and trust officer at IBM Corp. IBM, -0.20% ; and Gary Marcus, an NYU professor emeritus. All of the witnesses agreed that some form of regulation should be forthcoming, but they disagreed on what form.

Altman suggested the government have licensing, oversight and standards-setting mechanisms, while also raising fears that AI could cause “significant harm to the world.” Montgomery suggested establishing rules to govern the deployment of AI in specific use-cases without regulating the technology itself, and Marcus suggested a neutral global entity similar to nuclear-research regulator CERN that would assess systems before they are released to the public in a clinical-trial-like evaluation.