From Rest of World
The global struggle over how to regulate AI
By Katie McQue, Lais Martins, Ananya Bhattacharya, and Carien Du Plessis
Pontes had worked with NASA, attended the Naval Postgraduate School in California, and was less skeptical than many other senators about the major U.S. companies that dominate the AI race. “We cannot restrict technology,” he’d said at one of the AI bill’s early hearings, expressing caution about legislating AI tools that are still developing. Joining him in D.C. was Laércio Oliveira, a fellow conservative member of the Senate committee drafting the AI bill. The two were part of a delegation organized by a Brazilian congressional initiative that engages with the private sector. Its purpose: to have a series of meetings about the drafted AI bill with representatives of the U.S. government and Silicon Valley companies.
The drafted bill was one of the most comprehensive to date outside the West. It proposed a new oversight authority on AI, copyright protections for content used to train AI, and protections of individual rights, with anti-discriminatory checks in biometric systems and the right to contest AI decisions with significant human impact. It banned autonomous weapons and tools that could facilitate the creation and distribution of child sexual abuse material, and put stricter oversight on social media algorithms that can amplify disinformation. Global advocates for AI regulation saw Brazil as a potential model for other countries. But Pontes believed the bill could stifle investment and innovation — and saw it, he later told Rest of World, as “based on fear...”
Hany Farid, former dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information and a prominent regulation advocate who often testifies at government hearings on the tech sector, told Rest of World that lobbying by big U.S. companies over AI in Western nations has been intense. “They are trying to kill every [piece of] legislation or write it in their favor,” he said. “It’s fierce...”
