Martin Heinrich

New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich has long been a leader in AI legislation on the hill: He co-founded the AI Caucus in 2019 after observing the rapid development of machine learning. A couple of years later, when ChatGPT, Dall-E and similar AI tools exploded into the national consciousness, Heinrich says his fellow legislators started requesting meetings with him, asking, “What is the AI Caucus, and what do we need to know about this stuff?”

Now, Heinrich sits close to the center of many congressional AI efforts. He was a key member of the Senate AI Working Group that released a recommended roadmap for AI policy earlier this year. He’s the co-author of several AI-related bills, which attempt to tackle funding for dispersed AI research, the protection of journalists from having their work used by AI models without their consent, and the environmental impacts of AI. 

Those bills are indicative of Heinrich’s approach as neither an AI doomer nor an accelerationist of the tech. He deeply believes in AI’s potential to push science and medicine forward and wants the American AI industry to continue apace, but also wants both strong regulatory protections. “It would be unwise to treat AI the way we did the internet and social media early on, and say, 'Oh, we can wait until later to implement some guardrails,'” Heinrich says. “This is very fast-moving technology, and the opportunities for great things are enormous, but the opportunities for abuse are also substantial.”