[…] Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, introduced legislation that could allow the White House to unilaterally exempt AI companies from nearly any federal regulation.
The bill, called the SANDBOX Act—standing for “Strengthening Artificial Intelligence Normalization and Diffusion by Oversight and eXperimentation Act,” a clunker of an acronym even by congressional standards—would mandate the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, or OSTP, to create a “regulatory sandbox program” within one year of enactment. That program would allow companies working on artificial-intelligence products to request a “waiver or modification of one or more covered provisions” for an initial period of two years, renewable up to four times for a total of one decade of exemption from federal regulations.
But it wasn’t just the SANDBOX Act. Cruz also introduced his five-pillar “AI Framework,” of which the bill is only one part of the first pillar. The Senate Subcommittee on Science, Manufacturing, and Competitiveness—part of the Commerce Committee that Cruz chairs—also held a hearing on what Chair Ted Budd (R-NC) termed “the need for accelerated development and deployment of American AI products.” Rounding out the legislative branch’s unofficial AI Day was a House Committee on Natural Resources hearing where three permitting reform measures were discussed, with substantial testimony devoted to building a case against the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) because of how it impedes rapid data center construction.
Cruz’s legislation stands out from the pack, though, in its sweeping potential to completely rewrite federal regulation under the guise of a technocratic “sandbox” program. J.B. Branch, Public Citizen’s Big Tech accountability advocate, told me that the way “Cruz is trying to pitch this as sandboxes have been used before, this is normal” ignores that usually “when sandboxes are allowed, they’re for very specific niche regulations.”
Or as Anna Aurilio, campaigns director at Economic Security Project and ESP Action, put it, “This isn’t a sandbox, it’s a litter box.”
Cruz’ legislation would allow the executive branch to waive “everything from consumer safety rules to water quality standards to workplace safety requirement”.
The one thing the article doesn’t mention is copyright law — the LLM / ChatGPT bots are trained on a huge amount of copyrighted material, and they essentially copy that material and regurgitate it. So, in a just arrangement, creators whose material was used to train AI bots should get some kind of compensation, or at least have the option to have their material removed from the AI tools’ databases.
There’s already a way to keep Google from indexing your website — you just need to put a little bit of text in a file to tell it to buzz off. If AI engines had to follow a similar convention, I’d wager that most of them would be cut off by the vast majority of publicly-available content.
Instead, we’re going to put these delicate companies in their own special sandbox where none of the rules apply to them, just to forestall the inevitable AI bubble collapse.
This probably isn’t the most important topic of the day, but once in a while I like to point out that our supposed masters of the universe, the folks who will stop innovating if they ever pay their fair share of taxes, are recipients of massive government handouts and still want more special carve-outs so they can “innovate”, which has turned into another word for “behave like a parasite.”
