AI サービスが一時的に利用できないため、復旧後に翻訳を補完します。
Today, I’m talking with Senator Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California. Sen. 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 Trump gathering AI CEOs to the White House to sign a non-binding pact in which they agree to, you know, do a good job keeping AI safe. I asked Sen. 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 Sen. Schiff supports doing. Okay: California Senator Adam Schiff. Here we go. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Senator 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 in the bombing of that Iranian girls’ school, for example. There has been an effort to go after Anthropic, because Anthropic wanted to insist on not using AI for domestic mass surveillance or for fully autonomous weapons systems. That’s a national security issue. And their response in the administration was to try to kill Anthropic, and they’re still at it. So lots of national security concerns, none of them aired. When the president was asked about this by a reporter, he said, “Well, the world doesn’t have to worry about this because these companies love America.” I’m not really sure that’s much of an answer. And when he was asked, “Well, isn’t there anything else that’s necessary?” He pointed to his brain and wanted people to take comfort that he has, I guess, a very big brain, he tells us. He’s a stable genius, and therefore we don’t need to worry. He’s passed all the tests. So I’ve been told. You are obviously on a number of committees, but most importantly, I think for this conversation, you’re on a number of subcommittees as part of the Senate Judiciary Committee that are in the strike zone for AI. So you’re the ranking member on the subcommittee on Intellectual Property, you’re on the Privacy, Technology and the Law subcommittee, and then, of course, the Antitrust Competition Policy and Consumer Rights Committee. I just look at that list, and that is the dead center of the AI regulatory debate. What’s the conversation in Congress like as you debate these issues? In particular, I look at the IP issues, and they seem existential to these companies. If we start charging them for training data, they might not exist anymore. I think that’s right. When you look at, for example, all of the IP that’s been vacuumed up by these models to train these models, that’s a lot of the value of some of these entertainment companies. And so they live or die on the strength of their IP. But what makes this challenging is that not all of the players in the industry are the same. You’ve got big streamers involved; you’ve got big technology companies involved. You’ve got companies whose AI or their technology portfolio is much more important to them than the IP value of their film library. I don’t think the film library at Amazon is Amazon’s most important business. If it was, they probably wouldn’t have made the movie Melania. But my favorite review of that, by the way, was the Variety reviewer who said, “If you watch that movie on a plane, you would still walk out.” But the IP issues are really important. Senator Curtis and I are working together on them to begin by saying, we want to know what copyrighted material, what protected material, was used to train these models. And then we can have a discussion about what’s fair use and what isn’t, but we need these companies to retain that information. But lots of other IP issues, some beneficial. We had a hearing on the patent office, and the patent office’s use of AI to more quickly get through the backlog of patent applications. So there are going to be good applications too in the IP area, but also a lot of worry about what it means for people’s creative talents. I wanted to start with IP, not just because I’m a failed former copyright lawyer myself, and emphasis on the failed. I was no good at it. But it just seems like what this industry needs right now is a pretty holistic approach to regulation. So are the inputs of the models being collected in a legal way that benefits the ecosystem that created them? Are the studios going to get paid for a bunch of training data? Are website operators going to get paid for training Google’s models that they scrape with search? And then you’re on to, do they need an antitrust exemption so they can coordinate on safety and they don’t kill us all? And there’s a whole list of things in between those two ideas that also need some regulatory frameworks, that might just need some basic transparency laws. What do you think about that? Is our government prepared to start at the beginning, and end at the end, and do all the steps in the middle? Well, how I think about it is you’ve got all the input issues, and it really seems like the thought at these companies was, “We’re in a race. We’re just going to vacuum it all up. And yes, this probably violates a lot of the IP laws, but if we don’t do it, the other companies are going to do it. We’ll worry about the legality later.” So that’s what they’ve done. And of course they’re being sued by different parties, and some are settling these cases, and some are fighting these cases. But they began the process by just deciding they were going to ignore IP law, and they were just going to take [IP] and worry about the problems later. And then, in terms of the outputs, it has taken us to where we are today for these companies, I think, to consider the safety of the outputs. Do we need to start slowing down the pace of our development of these models because we don’t trust the outputs? We don’t know where they’ll lead. We can’t even control these models ourselves, let alone provide these models to the public, to good actors, to bad actors, and expect that we’re not going to have some terrible result. In terms of how I think about this holistically as a legislator, this is crying out for legislation. I am, I’ll be honest, very circumspect about Congress and legislating the tech sector because we did such a — I don’t know what language I’m allowed to use here — but such a shitty job when it comes to any kind of regulation of the harms, the societal harms coming out of social media. We’re going to have to do a much better job and much more quickly when it comes to AI, because the threats are even more significant and we’re already at the point of strong potential harms. It can’t wait. We certainly can’t take the kind of years we’ve taken to try to even wrap ourselves around social media. Can I ask about that comparison? I hear it a lot. I hear it from politicians. I hear it from the industry itself. I hear it from parents, of course. It seems to me that the problem with social media regulation was never that we’re too slow, or that no one can come up with an idea; it was always the very existence of the First Amendment. The thing you needed to do with social media was regulate the flow of disinformation, or keep teens from bullying one another, or from posting pro-anorexia content. All of that came down to being speech regulation. The companies knew this; the tech companies absolutely knew this. And I remember they would put up billboards in DC. Meta would put up billboards saying, “We welcome regulation.” Then I would listen to the ideas for regulation, and they would crash headfirst into the First Amendment, and then nothing would happen. And it seemed like that paralyzed us from doing things like privacy regulation, because it was tied up next to the very idea of social media. It doesn’t fee [truncated for AI cost control]