Mr Elon Musk Meets With Senate Leader Schumer on Capitol Hill as Senate Looks Into AI

Elon Musk returned to Capitol Hill on Wednesday and met with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. 

Just as he did on a previous visit, Musk, the chief executive officer of SpaceX, Tesla Inc. and Twitter Inc., slipped in quietly. On Jan. 27, he stopped at the offices of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and spoke to other top congressional Republicans. He also met with House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries.

Musk also met Wednesday with South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk Yeol, who is on a visit to Washington, according to the Yonhap News Agency.

“We had a very good meeting. We talked about Buffalo, Tesla has a large plant in Buffalo,” Schumer told reporters after the meeting. “And we talked about AI.” 

Schumer, a New York Democrat, has been considering legislation to regulate artificial intelligence. 

“Like we helped move the nation forward on chips in a good way that will help American jobs, the American economy and the American people, we’re going to try to do the same type of stuff on AI,” Schumer said in a brief interview on April 19.

Artificial intelligence has been a focus of research for years, from Silicon Valley to the Pentagon and globally. The November debut of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT, however, sent competitors rushing to release their own versions — and critics warning that the products risk regurgitating inaccurate and harmful results, and could lead to the development of AI systems that could not be easily controlled.