Sen. Adam Schiff on making Congress relevant in the AI age

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Today, I’m talking with Sen. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California. Schiff sits on a number of committees with oversight into tech and AI: intellectual property, antitrust, privacy and technology — it’s all there. I really wanted to ask him about how we might regulate anything related to the tech industry at this moment in time.

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But as you’ll hear, he started our conversation by talking about the self-dealing and corruption present all through our politics. That of course fell against the backdrop of President Donald Trump gathering AI CEOs to the White House to sign a nonbinding pact in which they agree to, you know, do a good job keeping AI safe.

I asked Schiff if he thinks that’s enough, how he thinks a more formal regulatory framework would look, and what might happen next if Democrats retake Congress in the midterms — all the way to whether he’d support impeaching the president (again) over all that corruption. We also spent some time comparing and contrasting how you might regulate AI with where we’ve landed regulating social media.

One nerdy note: You’re going to hear me ask the senator about something called Chevron deference and a Supreme Court case called Loper Bright. Basically, the Supreme Court overturned a Reagan-era precedent saying courts would defer to experts in agencies when the law was vague.

Now, the courts get to decide, which could cause any new regulation to get immediately tied up in litigation. That seems awfully relevant to the idea of creating a new agency to regulate AI, which Schiff supports doing.

Sen. Adam Schiff, you’re a United States senator from California. Welcome to Decoder.