Sen. Adam Schiff on AI regulation, free speech, and impeaching Trump one more time

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. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. 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. Okay: California Sen. Adam Schiff. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Sen. Adam Schiff, you’re a United States senator from California. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you. Great to be with you. I have been asking every politician who comes on the show this very basic question here in 2026. Senator, what the hell is going on in our country? It’s a very good question. I think we have seen things take place in the last couple of years in particular that we’ve never seen before. There’s sadly rampant corruption within the administration. Every day, every week, it’s a new thing. At the moment, I think what is most jarring is seeing campaign ads aired of the president that are paid for by taxpayer dollars. But every week it’s something else. It’s excluding press from the White House or Air Force One, or it’s some new moneymaking scheme or some new vanity project. If you look at, for example, the triumphal arch, they’re now claiming it’s a national security issue because they want to store ammunition in it. And why do they want to do that? Because the best legal argument they have is that this is not just cosmetic, that they have some national security purpose. So what are we seeing in the country? We’re seeing chaos and no focus on the cost of living and improving the quality of people’s lives at the administration level, or by my Republican colleagues in Congress, but I’m hoping that changes. The national security piece is very interesting to me in the context of a bunch of questions I have for you, because the Trump administration loves to justify every single thing it does by saying it’s national security, and it can’t be questioned, and this should bring more authority to the executive branch in one way or another. And they’ve been doing that since the beginning. But just this week, we had a bunch of tech executives at the White House signing a non-binding promise to evaluate their own AI systems. And there was no national security concern that made any of that binding, even though they are among the most prominent people in the country saying they might kill everyone. Can you square that circle at all? It’s very hard to square. It was interesting to see all those tech leaders there signing onto this voluntary pledge on the one hand and on the other hand, away from the White House grounds, away from the president, being very public and saying, “We need regulation. We don’t want this to be just ‘Trust us, we’ll do the right thing.’” So yeah, it was very distant, very jarring. None of these companies want to incur the wrath of this very vengeful president. Apparently, they will say what he wants them to say in his presence. But the reality is, there is a real national security threat here. As these models become more and more advanced, as they advance themselves through this recursive AI, we have less and less of a sense of what they’re doing, how they’re deciding what they’re deciding, and what they’re trying to access lawfully or unlawfully. That is a national security concern of the highest order. There are other security concerns too. The unbridled implementation of AI at the Pentagon can result in calamities, and we need to investigate what role AI may have played in target selection

Extras afișat conform termenilor RSS ai publicației · 200 cuvinte · textul integral și figurile sunt pe site-ul publicației