Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared before a US Senate committee to speak concerning the risks and potential of AI language models. Altman, together with many senators, called for international standards for artificial intelligence. He also urged the US to control the technology and arrange a recent agency, very like the Food and Drug Administration, to control AI. 

For an AI policy nerd like myself, the Senate hearing was each encouraging and frustrating. Encouraging since the conversation seems to have moved past promoting wishy-washy self-regulation and on to rules that would actually hold firms accountable. Frustrating because the controversy seems to have forgotten the past five-plus years of AI policy. I just published a story all the present international efforts to control AI technology. You’ll be able to read it here. 

I’m not the just one who feels this fashion. 

“To suggest that Congress starts from zero just plays into the industry’s favorite narrative, which is that Congress is to this point behind and doesn’t understand technology—how could they ever regulate us?” says Anna Lenhart, a policy fellow on the Institute for Data Democracy and Policy at George Washington University, and a former Hill staffer. 

Actually, politicians within the last Congress, which ran from January 2021 to January 2023, introduced a ton of laws around AI. Lenhart put together this neat list of all of the AI regulations proposed during that point. They cover every little thing from risk assessments to transparency to data protection. None of them made it to the president’s desk, but provided that buzzy (or, to many, scary) recent generative AI tools have captured Washington’s attention, Lenhart expects a few of them to be revamped and make a reappearance in a single form or one other. 

Listed below are just a few to regulate. 

Algorithmic Accountability Act

This bill was introduced by Democrats within the US Congress and Senate in 2022, pre-ChatGPT, to handle the tangible harms of automated decision-making systems, comparable to ones that denied people pain medications or rejected their mortgage applications.