Rep. Beyer calls for more regulation of AI
Rep. Don Beyer warns that AI could have significant negative consequences if not regulated and lauded the promise of fusion energy at a recent forum hosted by the Democratic Business Council of Northern Virginia.
Meanwhile, he said, his primary responsibility in Congress is promoting economic growth. “The faster the economy can grow, the better off we’re all going to be,” he said.
Beyer is a member and former chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, and is the senior Democrat on the Joint Economic Committee, which he chaired during the Biden administration. He represents the 8th District, which encompasses most of the Annandale/Mason District area.
The top issue for his constituents right now is economic insecurity, Beyer said.
“Everything Donald Trump has done in the past six months has moved us in the wrong direction – from destroying our investment in science and research, to the actions against universities, to the crazy tariff policies,” he said.
The 8th district is one of the 10 richest and most educated congressional districts in the country, and, up to now, has had an extremely low unemployment rate, he noted. “But we got hit harder by DOGE than any other district in the country.”
Beyer has been helping displaced federal workers get back on their feet. At a resource fair he hosted for federal workers and contractors in March, he heard many stories from people devastated by the sudden loss of their livelihoods.
Related story: Fired federal workers worry about financial security in a tight job market
As a leader in Congress on artificial intelligence, Beyer is concerned about the need for more regulations to address the potential negative impacts of AI.
Beyer is working on a master’s degree in machine learning at George Mason University, which is informing his work in Congress on the issue.
He served on the House Task Force on AI, which issued a report that outlined a roadmap for regulating AI.
“As we move forward, I get ever more scared about AI,” he said. Despite the breakthroughs in such areas as healthcare, “the deeper we get into it, the more we realize that it’s also possible that the race to be the first in AI is the race to be the first to lose control.”
“We don’t know where consciousness comes from,” he said. “We don’t know that building the smartest machines in the history of the universe is not going to build some kind of consciousness. Even the smartest people out there developing AI don’t know why it works.”
“It’s really important that we try to find ways to build in kill switches, so we know what to do when there’s loss of control,” he said. Meanwhile, “We need to slow it down until we figure out how to build it safely.”
At the same time, he said, we’re going to have to think creatively about how to deal with the huge number of workers that will be displaced by AI.
At this point, there are only four big companies – Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google – with the resources to develop AI.
Beyer sponsored legislation to “democratize the creation of AI” by establishing an open, large language model – the National AI Research Institute – that would be available to everybody, including small companies and professors. He hopes it will pass this year.
In Congress, Beyer said he is the “central cheerleader for fusion energy,” which will be a game changer for providing clean energy and slowing down climate change.
Fusion uses the same process that powers the sun without producing radioactivity. “It’s as close to the invention of fire as we can imagine,” Beyer said.
People have said fusion energy is the next big thing for the past 50 years, he acknowledged, but now, it’s finally becoming closer to reality. “We now have almost 30 companies in the United States racing to be the first to put fusion energy on the grid.” The private sector is way ahead of the federal government on fusion, he noted, while China is outspending the U.S. by a huge amount.
If we can produce fusion energy, we won’t need to rely on fossil fuels anymore to power cars, heat our homes, or power data centers, he said. Replacing fossil fuels with fusion energy will significantly reduce carbon emissions, which are the primary cause of climate change.