Bipartisan Senate Group Releases Long-Awaited ‘Roadmap’ for AI’s Legislation and Regulation

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Authors: Jim Frederick , Hannah R. Anderson

At a Glance

From an implementation perspective, the Senate’s roadmap recommends moving forward at the committee level rather than waiting on a larger AI package to come together.
The report encourages Senate committees to consider legislation supporting further deployment of AI in health care, and the appropriate guardrails and safety measures necessary to protect patients.
The roadmap addresses AI with broad strokes, but reflects the increasingly high priority that AI is being given at the federal level.

Not to be left out of the international discourse on AI, on May 15, 2024, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators released a long-awaited “roadmap” for AI, detailing areas the Senate considers ripe for legislation and regulation. The report, which proposes spending at least $32 billion annually on (non-defense) AI innovation, highlights nine specific policy domains reflecting the various AI-related forums held by the bipartisan group in the previous year. The topics of those forums include everything from innovation and AI, high impact uses of AI, and general AI-related risks, to democracy-related concerns and concerns regarding AI’s impact on national security, though the working group indicates that the roadmap is not an “exhaustive menu of policy proposals.”

From an implementation perspective, the Senate’s roadmap recommends moving forward at the committee level rather than waiting on a larger AI package to come together. With respect to the health and life sciences industry in particular, the roadmap includes commentary on how AI is being deployed across the full spectrum of health care services and encourages the relevant Senate committees to, among other things:

Consider legislation supporting further deployment of AI in health care, and the appropriate guardrails and safety measures necessary to protect patients
Support the National Institutes of Health in developing and improving AI technologies, and in making health care and biomedical data available for machine learning and data science research
Ensure that the Department of Health and Human Services and the Food and Drug Administration have the tools to weigh “the benefits and risks of AI-enabled products so that it can provide a predictable regulatory structure for product developers”
Consider legislation supporting transparency for providers and the public about the use of AI in medical products (including the data used to train AI models)

In addition, the Senate’s roadmap broadly addresses questions regarding privacy and liability by “encourag[ing] the relevant committees to consider whether there is a need for additional standards, or clarity around existing standards,” to hold AI developers, deployers and potentially end-users accountable if their products or actions cause harm to consumers.

As was the case for President Biden’s Executive Order on AI that was issued late last October, the roadmap addresses AI with broad strokes, but reflects the increasingly high priority that AI is being given at the federal level.