[Big tech companies are funneling money through a science
nonprofit to help pay the salaries of AI staffers in Congress — and
it’s just one example of the increasing influence outside-funded
fellows are exerting on tech policy in Washington.]
[[link removed]]

KEY CONGRESS STAFFERS IN AI DEBATE ARE FUNDED BY TECH GIANTS LIKE
GOOGLE AND MICROSOFT  
[[link removed]]


 

Brendan Bordelon
December 3, 2023
Politico
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Big tech companies are funneling money through a science nonprofit
to help pay the salaries of AI staffers in Congress — and it’s
just one example of the increasing influence outside-funded fellows
are exerting on tech policy in Washington. _

Microsoft is one of the top technology companies that is helping fund
fellows working on AI policy in key Senate offices., Jeenah Moon/Getty
Images

 

Top tech companies with major stakes in artificial intelligence are
channeling money through a venerable science nonprofit to help fund
fellows working on AI policy in key Senate offices, adding to the
roster of government staffers across Washington whose salaries are
being paid by tech billionaires and others with direct interests in AI
regulation.

The new “rapid response cohort
[[link removed]]” of congressional AI
fellows is run by the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, a Washington-based nonprofit, with substantial support from
Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, IBM and Nvidia, according to the AAAS. It
comes on top of the network of AI fellows funded by Open Philanthropy
[[link removed]],
a group financed by billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

The six rapid response fellows, including five with PhDs and two who
held prior positions at big tech firms, operate from the offices of
two of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s top three lieutenants
on AI legislation — Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Mike
Rounds (R-S.D.) — as well as the Senate Banking Committee and the
offices of Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Bill Cassidy (R-La.)
and Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.).

Alongside the Open Philanthropy fellows — and hundreds of
outside-funded fellows throughout the government, including many with
links to the tech industry — the six AI staffers in the
industry-funded rapid response cohort are helping shape how key
players in Congress approach the debate over when and how to regulate
AI, at a time when many Americans are deeply skeptical of the
industry.

The apparent conflict of tech-funded figures working inside the
Capitol Hill offices at the forefront of AI policy worries some tech
experts, who fear Congress could be distracted from rules that would
protect the public from biased, discriminatory or inaccurate AI
systems.

“Tech firms hold an unprecedented amount of financial capital and
have a long track record of using it to attempt to tilt the playing
field in their favor,” said Sarah Myers West, a former senior
advisor on AI policy at the Federal Trade Commission and managing
director at the AI Now Institute, a research nonprofit.

The companies involved stress that they don’t play roles in hiring;
the nonprofits themselves pick the fellows. And some on Capitol Hill
say industry-linked fellows are filling the vacuum caused by a
precipitous decline in institutional tech knowledge.

When lawmakers began a push several years ago for rules that would
rein in Silicon Valley, they found congressional tech expertise and
funding for permanent policy staff had largely evaporated
[[link removed]].
Outside fellowship programs — many with ties to the tech industry
— have emerged to fill that gap.

The trend has been supercharged by the recent AI frenzy on Capitol
Hill. As Congress searches for staffers that can make sense of the
fast-moving technology, new tech fellowships have sprouted across
Washington.

“There’s been this brain drain that’s occurred,” said Kevin
Kosar, a researcher at the center-right American Enterprise Institute
who specializes in congressional institutions. “Philanthropy is
having to step in and help out.”

But the speed with which some of these programs developed — and the
strong interest they’ve engendered in Silicon Valley — raise
questions about whether they’re more akin to an industry lobbying
campaign than a source of disinterested expertise.

AAAS is a Washington-based science nonprofit with a 50-year history
[[link removed]] of
funding fellows to work on science and technology policy in Congress
and at federal agencies.

But its new cohort of congressional AI fellows, conceived and launched
in just two months, is covered with AI industry fingerprints.

Money from Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia and IBM is partially
funding the salaries of the AI fellows placed by AAAS in influential
Senate offices this October — including those of Heinrich and
Rounds, who already have Open Philanthropy fellows.

Spokespeople for Heinrich and Rounds did not respond to requests for
comment.

The new AI fellowship was conceived and substantially coordinated by
Craig Mundie, a former Microsoft executive who still advises CEO Satya
Nadella and works on the company’s quantum computing project. Mundie
also serves as a strategic advisor to OpenAI, the iconic AI company
with a $13 billion partnership with Microsoft
[[link removed]].

In an interview with POLITICO, Mundie said he gave AAAS the idea for
an accelerated AI policy fellowship targeting Congress. He also helped
secure funding for the fellowship program from the tech companies and
individual donors.

“I sent the note to my friends, many of my friends run these
companies,” said Mundie. “What they did with it at that point was
their choice — and in their cases, they decided to have the company,
you know, look at making a gift.”

The new AI fellowship was conceived and substantially coordinated by
Craig Mundie, a former Microsoft executive. | Aijaz Rahi/AP

Mundie — who put a “small amount” of his own money into the new
AAAS fellowship — defended the decision by Microsoft, OpenAI and
other top tech companies to fund AI policy staff on Capitol Hill.

“When you’re at the bleeding edge of anything and you want to make
good policy, you want to talk to the people who actually are doing the
stuff — not people that are opining on what people might be
doing,” he said.

Julia MacKenzie, the chief program officer at AAAS, told POLITICO that
none of the AI firms financing the fellowship were allowed to
influence who was selected to serve as an AI fellow or pick the
congressional office in which they would be placed. Spokespeople for
AAAS said money from the five AI companies made up roughly 35 percent
of the new fellowship’s funding, with the remainder coming from
foundations, nonprofits and individual donors.

But some of those nonprofits also have significant ties to the tech
industry. That includes the Horizon Institute for Public Service, the
organization through which Open Philanthropy funds its own
congressional AI fellowship. Horizon executive director Remco
Zwetsloot, citing the “urgent” need for AI talent on Capitol Hill,
said his group provided $150,000 in “leftover general funds” to
“help AAAS launch its AI program.”

Tim Stretton, director of the congressional oversight initiative at
the nonpartisan watchdog Project On Government Oversight, said it’s
“never great when corporations are funding, essentially,
congressional staffers.” He said the money from five leading AI
firms, along with Mundie’s extensive involvement in the new AAAS
fellowship, suggests an improper level of tech industry influence.

“Most people would be concerned if Bank of America, Chase, any of
these large companies were funding staffers that worked on the Banking
Committee,” said Stretton. “Having staffers work in offices
producing legislation that — directly or indirectly — benefits the
companies or industry funding those staffers is a conflict of
interest.”

In addition to AAAS and the Horizon Institute, organizations such as
Schmidt Futures and the Federation of American Scientists are funding
tech staffers at the White House
[[link removed]] and
federal agencies.

Since its founding in late 2015, the nonprofit known as TechCongress,
founded by a former Capitol Hill aide, has sent nearly 100 tech
fellows to work in key congressional offices. Its current cohort
[[link removed]] includes fellows working
to craft AI policy at the House Science Committee, the Senate Commerce
Committee and the office of Senate Minority Whip John
Thune (R-S.D.), who has taken a major role
[[link removed]] in
crafting AI legislation.

The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation also has two tech fellows,
in the offices of Reps. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Bennie
Thompson (D-Miss.), who are respectively “presented by” Google
[[link removed]] and Facebook
[[link removed]].

Zach Graves, executive director at the Foundation for American
Innovation, a right-of-center tech policy nonprofit, called the
“corporate NASCAR-style logos” attached to those fellows “very
problematic.”

“Is it illegal? Probably not,” said Graves. “Is it unethical?
Almost certainly.”

Spokespeople for the foundation and the caucus did not respond to
repeated requests for comment. Spokespeople for Google and Meta,
Facebook’s parent company, said neither firm had any sway in
CBCF’s choice of tech fellows or the offices in which they were
placed.

Kosar said Capitol Hill’s increasing use of outside-funded tech
staffers comes at a cost — and it goes beyond the potential
conflicts of interest. He said tech fellows typically leave Congress
within a year or two after arriving, making it almost impossible for
lawmakers to accrue the institutional expertise needed to tackle AI or
other complex tech issues.

“You’re just bringing people in for a short term, and then
they’re rotating off,” Kosar said. “It’s not really directly
addressing the problem.”

A new AI fellowship forms

At a July dinner with AAAS CEO Sudip Parikh, Mundie, a longtime AAAS
member, made his pitch for a new fellowship that would place AI
experts into congressional offices at the forefront of AI policy.

“I kind of looked at Sudip and I said, ‘You know, in my view right
now, one of the biggest issues everybody’s gonna face is questions
about legislation and regulation as it relates to AI,’” said
Mundie. “‘[Does] the class you’re about to launch have any focus
in this area?’”

While AAAS has funded federal science and tech fellows for decades, it
does not often stray into issue-specific fellowships. But Mundie told
Parikh that Capitol Hill’s intense interest in AI legislation — he
called it a “once in a hundred years phenomenon” — should push
the nonprofit toward a targeted approach.

“I said, ‘Well, if you only assemble one class a year, and the
next class isn’t gonna launch until September of 2024, then
there’s not going to be any specialists advising Congress in
particular during this period of time,’” Mundie said.

Parikh ultimately agreed. Within a few weeks, AAAS had added six
AI-specific fellows to the more than 270 scientists and engineers it
placed across Congress and federal agencies this year.

AAAS CEO Sudip Parikh agreed with Craig Mundie pitch for a new
fellowship that would place AI experts into congressional offices at
the forefront of AI policy. | Oliver Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

Although the new AI fellows technically fall under the auspices of the
nonprofit’s long-running science and tech policy fellowships
program
[[link removed]] —
which includes extensive safeguards to lessen the risk of corporate
capture — the AI program operates under what AAAS’s MacKenzie
called a “unique funding consortium” that includes money from top
AI firms.

It’s a marked difference from AAAS’s overarching fellowship
program, which gets the vast majority of its funding from the federal
government, science foundations and nonprofits. It was also an unusual
move for the AI firms — spokespeople for Google and OpenAI said
those grants were the first either company has given to AAAS. A
spokesperson for the science nonprofit said none of the five tech
companies backing the AI fellowship provided funds for its broader
fellowship program this year.

Mundie, on his own accord, reached out to a number of his
“friends” about financing the fellowship, including individuals at
the AI companies who ultimately contributed funds, he said.

“This thing was completely at my own personal initiative,” Mundie
said. “It had never been discussed, or reviewed, or suggested, or
anything you can remotely think of as pre-considered with any of the
companies I work with.”

That assertion was echoed by a spokesperson for OpenAI, who said
Mundie did not act on behalf of the company. A Microsoft spokesperson
declined to comment.

Spokespeople for Google, IBM, Nvidia and OpenAI all stressed their
lack of involvement in selecting, training or placing the AI fellows
on Capitol Hill. Google, IBM and OpenAI said they chose to contribute
funds to the AAAS fellowship as part of their commitment to assist
Congress as it works to understand and regulate the technology.

A spokesperson for Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), chair of the Senate
Banking Committee, which has a rapid-response fellow, said the senator
has long “benefitted from working with fellows with diverse
backgrounds and areas of expertise.”

“No one should have any doubt that Sen. Brown will always stand up
to industry and special interests, and put workers and consumers
first,” the spokesperson said.

A Wyden aide, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss
internal matters, said the senator “sets the policy direction of his
office’s tech work,” and praised the contributions of past AAAS
fellows who worked in Wyden’s office.

But the aide also sounded a cautionary note about the increasing
presence of outside-funded tech fellowships on Capitol Hill.

“Unfortunately, congressional offices remain woefully underfunded
and understaffed in light of the major challenges facing our country,
in particular when it comes to technology,” the Wyden aide said.
With those “constraints” in mind, the aide called outside
fellowships an “essential pathway for offices to recruit and
train” mid-career staff and subject matter experts.

The aide added that Wyden “strongly supports providing congressional
offices with additional resources to recruit and retain staff,
including experts, which would reduce the need for fellowships.”

Spokespeople for Cassidy and Kelly did not respond to questions about
the AAAS fellows working on AI policy in their offices.

The growing knowledge gap

TechCongress contrasts its efforts to avoid conflicts of interest with
the policies of some other groups that fund congressional tech
fellows.

Founder Travis Moore — the former legislative director for retired
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) — recalled sitting in his Capitol Hill
office a decade ago, pulling his hair out over the Cyber Intelligence
Sharing and Protection Act.

Moore had been tasked with crafting Waxman’s position on the tech
bill. But he found himself “increasingly underwater” when it came
to the complex questions it raised.

“There wasn’t anyone in Congress that could answer those questions
for me,” Moore said. “And so I had to go outside of the building,
and I went to a big tech company. And that made me deeply
uncomfortable.”

The experience prompted Moore to found TechCongress
[[link removed]], which has funded outside tech
staffers in congressional offices every year since 2016.

“Certain sectors are decently represented in Congress,” Moore
said, singling out health care as one such sector. “Tech was not one
of them.”

Like others, Moore blamed the 1995 closure of Capitol Hill’s Office
of Technology Assessment as a major factor behind today’s shortage
of tech expertise. He said tightening staff budgets have only
aggravated the situation.

“There’s definitely still a resource crunch,” Moore said.
“Two-thirds of our fellows would like to stay on [in Congress],
[but] just under a third are able to.”

TechCongress was kick-started with tech money — Reid Hoffman, the
co-founder of LinkedIn, was its initial financier.

But Moore said his organization has since shed those ties. For the
past two years, it’s operated as an independent nonprofit, eschewing
corporate dollars in favor of funding from education philanthropies
like the Knight and Ford Foundations. Moore said TechCongress only
recruits fellows with a general interest in tech policy and avoids
fellowships that center on specific technologies.

“It is a red flag for us when we have people that apply and
they’re like, ‘I only want to work on crypto, I only want to work
on AI,’” Moore said.

Moore said he understands why some ethics experts are wary of the
surging number of outside-funded tech fellows in Congress. But he
argued that the fellows supported by TechCongress don’t act as
shills for the tech industry — and in fact, they give Congress the
tools to better resist pressure from Silicon Valley.

“Because of their knowledge of tech, they are able to be firmer
checks on special interests,” Moore said.

Others, like Graves, view Capitol Hill’s reliance on tech fellows as
“suboptimal” — particularly when fellowships are financed with
corporate dollars and when fellows work on issues where those
corporations have a clear interest.

But if Congress can’t pony up the money to hire and retain permanent
tech staffers, Graves suggested outside fellowships are the least
worst option — especially as tech expertise continues to atrophy
across key congressional committees.

“Fellowships like TechCongress or AAAS serve a really valuable kind
of stopgap in rebuilding some of that committee expertise,” Graves
said.

With Congress unlikely to pump much more money into permanent tech
staff, lawmakers at the forefront of AI and other emerging tech issues
will increasingly have to rely on staffers funded by outside groups.
And they’ll need to navigate all the ensuing problems, including
frequent staff turnovers and possible conflicts of interests.

“You get what you pay for,” said Kosar. “And if you’re not
willing to pay for it, you’re left taking what people are willing to
give you.”

_BRENDAN BORDELON is a reporter at POLITICO_

_POLITICO is the global authority on the intersection of politics,
policy, and power. It is the most robust news operation and
information service in the world specializing in politics and policy,
which informs the most influential audience in the world with insight,
edge, and authority. Founded in 2007, POLITICO has grown to a team of
700 working across North America, more than half of whom are editorial
staff._

* artificial intelligence
[[link removed]]
* regulation
[[link removed]]
* US Senate
[[link removed]]
* Big Tech
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]