OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, others testify at Senate hearing | full video

To our witnesses, thank you for joining us this morning. In the last two years, AI has brought the United States and the world to a critical inflection point. AI may be a technology as transformative as the internet, or even more so. It has unleashed a new global industrial revolution with the potential to unlock opportunities that improve our quality of life, create jobs, and stimulate economic growth. The country that leads in AI will shape the 21st century global order as a matter of economic security, as a matter of national security. America has to beat China in the AI race. China has made AI central to its national strategy, and China aims to lead the world in AI by 2030, investing heavily in AI adoption across industries like manufacturing and defense. In this race, the United States is facing a fork in the road. Do we go down the path that embraces our history of entrepreneurial freedom and technological innovation, or do we adopt the command and control policies of Europe? I would suggest that Congress draw on the lessons we can learn from the dawn of the internet. In the early 1990s, Washington embraced the internet and explicitly adopted a style of regulation that was intentionally and decisively light touch. Congress chose to deregulate under the Telecommunications Act of 1996, while President Clinton pursued tariff agreements and treaties that protected America's intellectual property and technological exports. Further, in 1998, Congress enacted a 10-year internet tax moratorium so that state laws wouldn't Balkanize and stymie the promise of e-commerce. The results of these decisions were extraordinary. By 2000, the United States had recorded five straight years of historic highs in productivity gains and investment growth. Hundreds of thousands of new jobs were created, and the United States became a top tech exporter with massive sums of private investment pouring into the US digital economy. By contrast, EU countries pursued a series of heavy-handed regulations that proved enormously costly. In 1993, the United States and Europe had economies virtually identical in size. Today, the American economy is more than 50% larger than Europe's. The drivers of that are tech and the shale revolution. Those two comprise virtually the entirety of that massive growth over Europe. According to one EU Commission report, only 6% of global AI startup funding flows to EU firms. 6%. That is one-tenth of the amount that is going to American companies. The report directly blames this yawning chasm on the EU's nasty regulatory approach. And yet, the Biden administration, for inexplicable reasons, tried to align AI policy with the EU, to adopt their failed policies. President Biden's sweeping AI executive order, the longest executive order in American history, cast AI as dangerous and opaque, laying the groundwork for audits, risk assessments, and regulatory certifications. Biden's approach inspired similar efforts in state legislatures across the country, threatening to burden startups, developers, and AI users with heavy compliance costs. Some of my colleagues suggest that a friendlier version of the Biden approach makes sense. They want a testing regime to guard against AI discrimination and have government agencies provide guidance documents, seemingly something out of Orwell, that will usher in what they call best practices, as if AI engineers lack the intelligence to responsibly build AI without the bureaucrats. Many in the industry foolishly have supported such paternalism. Harmful regulations take many forms. Biden's misguided midnight AI diffusion rule on chips and model weights would have crippled American tech companies' ability to sell AI to the world. The Biden plan would have handed over key markets to China. We should want foreign countries, particularly our allies, to buy American. I vocally opposed this rule for months, and indeed the ranking member and I together urged the Biden administration not to adopt it. And I'm very pleased that President Trump has now confirmed he plans to rescind it. All of this busybody bureaucracy, whether Biden's industrial policy on chip exports or industry and regulator approved guidance documents, is a wolf in sheep's clothing. To lead in AI, the United States cannot allow regulation, even the supposedly benign kind, to choke innovation or adoption. American dominance in AI depends on two factors: innovation and adoption. Innovation drives breakthroughs and global competitiveness. Adoption ensures that these tools empower American workers and businesses, enabling the United States to become the world's leading adopter and exporter of AI. Thankfully, President Trump has largely reversed Biden's misguided AI agenda. In fact, I think AI was a sleeper issue in this last election. Americans wanted to see President Trump and Republicans, and indeed all senators, champion AI policies focused on innovation and adoption. The contrast has been astounding. This year, there have been over $1 trillion of new AI projects, including major investments in Texas like the CoreWeave data center in Plano and the $500 billion project Stargate in Abilene by OpenAI and Oracle and others. Adopting a light touch regulatory style for AI will require Congress to work alongside the president, just as Congress did with President Clinton. We need to advance legislation that promotes long-term AI growth and innovation. That's why I will soon release a new bill that creates a regulatory sandbox for AI, modeled on the approach taken by Congress and President Clinton at the dawn of the internet. That will remove barriers to AI adoption, prevent needless state overregulation, and allow the AI supply chain to rapidly grow here in the United States. That's how we'll accelerate economic growth, secure US dominance in AI, and beat China. And with that, I turn to the ranking member, Senator Cantwell.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for this hearing and welcome to the witnesses before us: Mr. Altman, Dr. Su, Mr. Intrator, and Mr. Smith. It's a great pleasure to have all of you here, but it's especially a prideful moment for the Pacific Northwest to have Mr. Smith and Mr. Altman here, both representing an open AI approach. By that, I mean an approach where we want to win against China and a closed system by making sure that what is developed here in the United States and around the globe is an architecture where the United States wins and is open. To do that, we need to focus on winning in computing power, on algorithms, and on robust data sources. All of that will be key. Personally, I believe a continued investment in NSF helps in all of those areas as a good public-private partnership with the industry that's represented here today. I'm so proud that we passed the Chips and Science Act, because the Chips and Science Act also set a foundation for investing in the United States of America and bringing more of the supply chain back to the United States of America to build on a future leadership that we already have. I believe in the computing power, but we also need to understand that we have to move forward on the chips act, like the University of Washington $10 million grant on multi-design sets for chips, the very large scale integrated designs. I'm sure that Dr. Su will tell us about today. But the fact that the United States has to continue to lead on the future designs and the implementation of that also requires us to be very smart about data centers, about sources of electricity, and how we're going to build that supply that could be up to 12% of electricity demand in the very near future. So how do we do that? I've noticed in each of your testimonies you've all explained this, but I'm also very proud that Microsoft has already signed an agreement with one company, Fusion Energy in Everett, Washington, for a power source supply. Maybe Mr. Altman in his testimony will talk about this, but they hope to get very near future energy source from that. So clearly, the United States leading on electricity and development. So Mr. Smith, very much appreciate in your testimony the accentuation on the fact that the United States of America needs hundreds of thousands of new electricians, something we should all want to get behind. The fact that having electricity and the electricians and the data source centers here in the United States and in other places will be key. While I want to see us move forward, as the chairman said, we signed a letter saying we needed a broader support for export controls. I want to be clear: export controls are not a trade strategy. They are not a back pocket issue that the president of the United States whips out in trade negotiations. We are going to move fast because we are going to set standards. I believe those standards should be encouraging very broad distribution of US manufactured and made AI chips and technology, and that we're asking our partners overseas to comply with the rules that we establish. Things like making sure that there is no circumvention of the supply that somehow gets into China's hands, making sure that we have access and making sure that we can verify on that, and also making sure that US data companies and cloud-based companies are allowed to be in that market. We should not be going to markets overseas only to have them tell us that organizations with cloud services from the US would not be allowed. This, I believe, would be a robust initiative on getting US AI chips and US AI open systems dominated around the globe. Why do we need to move fast? We need to move fast because if we don't, we are looking at another Huawei, another instance where the United States is behind and also saying we should tear out this system that now we don't like for lots of reasons and backdoor policies. So I'm all for winning. That is why we passed the Chips and Science Act. I'm all for winning, and that is why we have passed seven bills out of this committee last year that kind of got stuck in the lame duck. I think the chairman of the committee wasn't ready to move forward in negotiations with the House and Senate on those seven bills. But those bills, a bill between myself and Senator Young on the Institute for Standards, NIST standards, which I think we still need to do, my colleague and I, Moran, on education and scholarships, small business, and the bill by my colleague here Senators Klobuchar and Thune, which was also related to the NIST standards. So we had an opportunity a year ago to move fast. We didn't do it. So let's do this now. Let's get together and figure this out. The faster the United States moves now, I like this great Paul Romer quote, which was about collaboration is the next phase of innovation. If we don't collaborate here, if we throw down on politics instead of getting the policy right, we won't move fast. Let's allow these people to do what they do best, and let's make sure the United States has the right policies in place so that our open AI standard wins the day. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you. I'd now like to introduce our witnesses for today. Each of our witnesses and their companies represent critical parts of the AI infrastructure hardware and software supply chain. Our first witness is Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI. OpenAI is one of the world's most advanced AI companies, known best for its ChatGPT product. Our second witness is Lisa Su, the chair and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, AMD. AMD develops high performance processors, graphic chips, and AI accelerators that power artificial intelligence. And Dr. Su is also a Texan. Our third witness today is Michael Intrator, the CEO and co-founder of CoreWeave, an AI hyperscaler. CoreWeave is the world's largest purpose-built AI cloud platform. And our final witness is Brad Smith, the vice chair and president of Microsoft. I believe everyone is familiar with his company. Mr. Altman, you are recognized for your opening statement.

If you could turn on the volume. Sorry about that. And I do enjoy telling techies how to operate the tech. Pretty embarrassing that I couldn't figure that out. Anyway, thank you, Chairman, thank you Ranking Member Cantwell, thank you all senators and fellow panelists. It's a real honor to be here. I was here about two years ago, and at that time ChatGPT had recently launched. It was a curiosity in the world. People weren't sure what it was going to mean, what it was going to be used for. Today, we've made significant progress. ChatGPT is used by more than 500 million people a week. I just saw yesterday that according to SimilarWeb, it's now the fifth biggest website on the internet globally, growing very quickly. But most of all, it's being used in really important ways. It's significantly increasing productivity. We hear scientists say they're two or three times more productive than they could be before. We hear people getting medical advice or learning in ways they couldn't before. And it's no longer this thing that was going to come in the future, but it's here now and people are really using it. We're very proud to be one of the leaders of this. We're very proud that America is leading in AI so significantly. And I think that's critical what Senator Cruz said about the importance of innovation in America and that we have what happened with the internet happen again. I believe this will be at least as big as the internet, maybe bigger. For that to happen, investment in infrastructure is critical. I believe the next decade will be about abundant intelligence and abundant energy. Making sure that America leads in both of those, that we are able to usher in these dual revolutions that will change the world we live in in incredibly positive ways, is critical. I got to go to Abilene, Texas yesterday, where we're building out what will be the largest AI training facility in the world. It's coming along beautifully, super exciting to see. We need a lot more of that. There's a whole AI factory supply chain of energy, chips, standing up data centers, building the racks and more. We've got to do that really well in the US so that we can continue to innovate, continue to lead, and continue to shape this revolution. Speaking of that, I was very inspired by what Chairman Cruz said, so I'd like to deviate from script here and tell a story. In my prepared written testimony, I covered the basics, so if it's okay, I'd love to tell you a story. I grew up in St. Louis and I was a computer nerd, and it was the time of the internet boom and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. We lived in this beautiful old brick house in a suburb of St. Louis, and I lived in the attic and I had this computer and I would stay up all night and I would learn to program and I got to use the internet. It was a crazy time of tons of innovation, all sorts of stuff was happening. It was amazing, and it was all happening here. All the internet companies were in the US. I used a Mac that was built here. I used chips that were started near where I now live. And I learned about computers. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. And I can draw a straight line from that experience to founding OpenAI and getting to work on companies like Helium. The spirit of American innovation and supportive entrepreneurship, I don't think the internet could have happened anywhere else, and if that didn't happen, I don't think the AI revolution would have happened here. I am a child of the internet revolution. I have the great honor to be one of the many parents of the AI revolution, and I think it is no accident that that's happening in America again and again and again. But we need to make sure that we build our systems and that we set our policy in a way where that continues to happen. I think this is magic. I don't want to live in Europe either. I think America is just an incredible and special thing, and it will not only be the place where the AI revolution happens, but all the revolutions after. I was home visiting St. Louis recently, drove by our old house, and it was at night and I looked up and in that top floor window the light was on. And I thought, hopefully there's some kid in there staying up late at night playing with ChatGPT, figuring out how he or she is going to start whatever company comes next. And whatever the next thing is after AI will happen here too. That is the magic of this country. It's incredibly personally important, and I hope it keeps going. Thank you very much for having me.

And I had an Apple II as well with a shoebox of floppy discs, and somehow I ended up taking a wrong turn and ending up in politics instead. Mr. Intrator, I started out with a Vic 20.

Chairman Cruz, Ranking Member Cantwell, and distinguished members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. I'm honored to appear alongside my industry colleagues and partners. My name is Michael Intrator. I am the co-founder and CEO of CoreWeave. Founded seven years ago, CoreWeave started like many innovative ventures, humbly in a garage, experimenting initially with graphics processing units, or GPUs, for cryptocurrency mining. Recognizing the transformational potential, we pivoted to support powerful AI applications, dramatically scaling the vision and operation. Today, CoreWeave stands at the forefront of America's AI infrastructure revolution, operating more than 30 data centers across 15 states. We manage more than 250,000 GPUs, currently using 360 megawatts of power. Over two short years, our revenue has surged by 12,000%, reaching $1.9 billion in 2024. As a result of this progress, CoreWeave became a publicly traded company on March 28th of 2025. CoreWeave's rapid growth is a testimony not only to the technology but also to the surging global demand for advanced AI infrastructure. Our infrastructure enables American businesses to rapidly translate AI aspirations into impactful economic realities. By empowering companies to accelerate innovation, we're fueling America's competitive edge while improving productivity and prosperity. Modern AI requires specialized infrastructure, purpose-built computing capabilities that surpass traditional cloud computing in scale and performance. Today's general purpose cloud was built to support and scale the complexity of AI workloads. We cannot run a 21st century economy on 20th century infrastructure. AI workloads involve trillions of simultaneous calculations, demanding unprecedented computing power, advanced cooling systems, cutting edge chip technology, ultra high speed networks, and accelerated storage. Since 2018, the computing power necessary for advanced AI models has multiplied approximately 100,000-fold. At CoreWeave, our facilities symbolize America's great tradition of innovation. Our data centers, built, maintained, and staffed by skilled American workers, embody how modern technology not only stimulates economic growth and enhances national security but also improves human lives. We are at a critical juncture in the global AI competition. The nation that leads in infrastructure will set the global economic agenda and shape human outcomes for decades. Our largest competitor, China, recognizes the stakes and is spending significant resources to strengthen their position. I want to focus on four elements of policy that will help determine whether the US secures its leadership role in the AI race. First, strategic investment stability. AI infrastructure is deeply capital intensive and requires a significant level of coordination across industry stakeholders. Stable, predictable policy frameworks, secure supply chains, and regulatory environments that foster innovation are crucial. Policymakers must provide clear and consistent policy and regulations across all jurisdictions that enables long-term investment and rapid scaling of AI technology. Second, energy infrastructure development. To support the rapid deployment of AI infrastructure, America must ensure abundant and affordable supplies of energy. Careful reforms in permitting and regulatory process are necessary to accelerate infrastructure projects, facilitate more rapid construction, interconnections, and energy for data centers. Third is global market access. Maintaining America's leadership also means ensuring our technology has fair access to global markets. Export controls and trade agreements can be calibrated to both address national security risks and support global diffusion of American AI technology. And finally, public-private partnerships and workforce development. America's unique advantage in the AI race is enhanced by our powerful tradition of public-private partnership. CoreWeave is proud to co-found the New Jersey AI Hub with Microsoft, Princeton University, and the New Jersey Economic Development Initiative. Initiatives like this develop critical workforce skills, foster innovation, and ensure economies and communities are prepared for the AI-driven future. America stands ready to lead the AI revolution, which will bring enormous benefits. It is a rare moment in time that we must meet. If government, industry, and all affected parties work together, the United States can win this race and seize the vast opportunity ahead of us. Thank you again for the opportunity to testify. I look forward to answering your questions.

Thank you. Chairman Cruz, Ranking Member Cantwell, members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to be here today. Let me just build on what my three colleagues have said and offer a few thoughts. The first is I just wanted to refer to the chart on this easel that shows the AI tech stack that was also in my written testimony. It makes a simple but I think important point: we're all in this together. If the United States is going to succeed in leading the world in AI, it requires infrastructure, it requires success at the platform level, it requires people who create applications. Interestingly, we at Microsoft get to work with all three of these leaders and their companies. Our success, each of our success, depends on each other's success. And what's true of the four of us is true when you look across the country and around the world at open-source developers, people who are building power plants, electricians and pipe fitters who are going to work every single day. So what do we need from the Congress and the country in order to succeed? I think it's three things. I described them in my written testimony. First, as Chairman Cruz said, we need innovation. Innovation will go faster with, as Sam said, more infrastructure, faster permitting, more electricians. We need more innovation fueled, as Ranking Member Cantwell said, by support from our universities and the federal agencies that support basic research across the country, one of this country's crown jewels. We also need, as Chairman Cruz said, faster adoption, what people refer to as AI diffusion, the ability to put AI to work across every part of the American economy to boost productivity, to boost economic growth, to enable people to innovate in their work. And the number one ingredient for that, history shows time and time again, is skilling, investing in education. And finally, we need to export. If America is going to lead the world, we need to connect with the world. We need to remember, I believe always, that as a country, only 4.5% of the world's people live in the United States of America. Our global leadership relies on our ability to serve the world with the right approach to export controls and always, especially in technology, in our ability to sustain the trust of the rest of the world. Ultimately, I think people who take the time to watch or read about this hearing may wonder, what is this all about? What are we at this table trying to do? What do these two letters, AI, really mean to them? Are we who are working in this industry trying to build machines that are better than people, or are we trying to build machines that will help people become better? Emphatically, it is and needs to be the latter. Are we trying to build machines that will outperform people in all the jobs that they do today, or are we trying to build machines that will help people pursue better jobs and even more interesting careers in the future? Indisputably, it needs to be the second, not the first. And I believe that is what we are and can do together. As somebody who's now spent almost 32 years in this industry, there are two things that always strike me. The first probably won't surprise you: never underestimate what technology can do, how quickly it can move, what it can accomplish. But the second is one that I think is too seldom discussed, even though every day it stares us in the face: never underestimate what people can do. Never underestimate human ambition. Never underestimate what a person can do if given a better technology tool and the ability to learn how to put it to use. That's the story of this industry. It's the story of the country. It is, as you heard, the story of Sam Altman. Not everybody becomes a Sam Altman or a Satya Nadella or a Bill Gates. Everybody deserves the opportunity to try. Tonight across America, whether it's the attic of a house or the basement or just an everyday bedroom, there are kids with computers, with phones, with access to the internet, and now the ability to put AI to work. Let's invest in their education. Let's invest in the skills that the American public needs. Let's then invest in creating the future that the American public deserves. Thank you.

Well, thank you witnesses for your testimony. I'll start off with the first round of questions and move down to our ranking member here. Thank you for your testimony. Certainly makes me sleep better at night worried about Terminator and Skynet coming after us knowing that you guys are behind the wheel. But in five words or less, start with you, Mr. Smith. What are the five words you need to see from our government to make sure we win this AI race?

More electricians. That's two words.

Broader AI education and no using ChatGPT as a phone a friend. Thank you.

I would say that we need to focus on streamlining the ability to build large things.

Allow supply chain sensible policy.

That was good. So what I hear there is something pretty similar to the races we've won before. Nuclear energy, for example. The Germans and Austrians really led the innovation around that, but we won the race because we put a massive government effort collaborating with our universities and others to win that race. Space, you know, the Soviets put the first satellite up, put the first man in space, but we won the space race because we adopted a framework to ensure that we won. Aviation, automobiles, etc. So what I hear from you is you do need support from our government, but you also need the government to stay out of your way so you can innovate and win this race. How do we incentivize companies to do business here in America to make sure we win this race in America and America leads, not just China but other non-state actors too? I mean, I think that the scariest thing about AI from a capability standpoint is it doesn't have to be a state actor to win this race. It's not like nuclear energy, it's not like space technology. A non-state actor could just as easily win this race and wield more power than anyone else. So how do we encourage innovators and investment to happen here in America to ensure we win this race? Mr. Altman, you want to start?

We were honored to announce back in January Project Stargate, a $500 billion investment in United States infrastructure that is now well underway. As I mentioned, getting to see it yesterday in Abilene, the first site was incredible. We need a lot more of that. We need certainty on the ability to build out this entire supply chain: build the data centers, permit the electricity. We'd love to bring chip production here, network production here, server rack production here. And I think the world does want to invest. We have a lot of global investment flowing into the US to do this. We also want to make sure that other countries are able to build with our technology, use our models, and be in our orbit and use US diffusion of technology here. So that's really important. We need to make sure that the highest skilled researchers that want to come work at US companies can come here and do that. We need to make sure that companies like OpenAI and others have legal clarity on how we're going to operate. Of course there will be rules, of course there need to be some guardrails. This is a very impactful technology, but we need to be able to be competitive globally. We need to be able to train, we need to be able to understand how we're going to offer services and where the rules of the road are going to be. So clarity there. And I think an approach like the internet, which did lead to flourishing of this country in a very big way, we need that again.

Are companies weighing doing business in AI in America versus China? Are the companies making that side-by-side comparison?

Well, I think I hear the words infrastructure, electricians, universities, regulatory framework, and I think those are things we can help with. I hear words like innovation and talent, and I hear Dr. Su to run faster. Those aren't things a government can manufacture. Talent, we can't make you run faster, but we can give you the tools to do that. And I think it's time that we create a framework so that you have the tools you need to win this race, because you're going to be the ones that win it, not us. Thank you for your testimony and recommendations.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'd like to continue that same theme generally about competitiveness. Do we need NIST to set standards? If you could just yes or no, just go down the line.

I don't think we need it. It can be helpful.

Yes.

Yes.

Okay. So in the context of what we're talking about here, we're really just talking, I don't know, Mr. Smith or Mr. Intrator or Dr. Su, any of you. The issue here is if we want to move fast, we want to create, just like with electricity, the standards by which we want to move fast here. I would just call it code for code is what we want. We want NIST to do something in the standard setting that will allow us to move much faster. Is that right? Either Mr. Smith or Mr. Intrator?

What I would say is this: first of all, NIST is where standards go to be adopted, but it's not necessarily where they first are created.

Thank you for that clarity. We're talking about an industry that has lots of different organizations, industry input, and then they're adopted. So yes, let's clarify that. I think that's the way it works.

Yes. And you think we need to do that, particularly if the United States wants to lead? We will need industry standards. We will need American adoption of standards. And you are right, we will need US efforts to really ensure that the world buys into these standards.

Okay. Mr. Intrator?

I think it's important that when you're working with standards, what that allows for is a common vocabulary which allows for acceleration. So to the extent that we can step into that role and establish touch points where everyone can agree on specific things, that will lead to an acceleration both domestically and abroad.

And I don't know if you know drilling down more on what you think those are, but in general, when I think about the internet and HTTP or HTML or any of the number, TCP/IP, we're talking about things that allowed us to move faster. And getting those standards established helped us do that. On the export issue, Mr. Intrator, the issue of cloud sources shouldn't be left out. If we say let's go with Malaysia, Malaysia is going to tell us that they can certify that there's no diversion of these chips to Asia, to China, and we basically have a way that we can make sure that this is understood and monitored. Then we also want access, right? We want access by US companies.

Yeah, I think Lisa's point was excellent. At the end of the day, the world wants to be able to build and deploy artificial intelligence in a very broad way. And if we, nature is a vacuum, if we do not step into that role, other technology will step in that role. If it is suboptimal, so be it. It's better to have something that is suboptimal than have nothing.

Well, we don't want a recurrence of a Huawei that develops faster and then has a government backdoor and then we all have to raise opposition. I'm for a tech NATO. I'm for the five most sophisticated democracies and tech nations setting the rules of the road and saying this is who you should buy from. Don't buy from anybody else who has a government backdoor. Not a good idea. So that's how we get leverage. I'm not so hot on the president's tariff agenda for this very reason, because we're not building the alliances, we're creating the enemies. And what I want to do is get the supply chain here, get the semiconductor flow here, lower the cost, and go as fast as we can.

I agree with that. I don't think anybody's not going to agree with that. I think that's an excellent objective. I just think that what will happen beyond the five NATO companies is that there will be a demand for artificial intelligence and they will proceed with what they can proceed with.

Dr. Su, what is your view of this about how we win, how we protect our objectives, but we're more aggressive on the export strategy?

Thank you so much.

The senior senator from Ohio. Thank you, Chairman. Make sure Senator Cruz heard that one. So first of all, thank you for being here and taking the time. If I could, just real quickly, just confirm that I've heard what you said pretty unanimously, which is we need dramatically more power generation in this country. Is that correct? All right. So Dr. Su, you recently did a partnership with TSMC to manufacture your chips here in America. Thank you. I think it's a little bit long overdue. I wish we had done more of that earlier. Those semiconductor fabs are high energy users.

Correct. We absolutely need the highest performing chips, and we also need the entire ecosystem for chip manufacturing. So wafers are one piece, but there are many other pieces as well.

So do you think it's outrageous that last year, because of the policies of the Biden administration, 90% of new power generation in this country was windmills and solar panels, and we absolutely kneecapped American energy? We have a thousand years of natural gas sitting in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, and yet 90% of power generation in this country last year was solar panels and windmills. Does that make this country more competitive or less competitive? Anybody can jump into that one that wants to answer.

Let me say two things. One, you're right, we need more electricity. I think our industry, it's worth remembering, is only going to account for 15% of the total additional electricity the country is going to need. We are going to need electricity from a variety of sources. Today in the United States, 56% of our electricity comes from carbon, 44% comes from carbon-free energy, meaning nuclear, wind, or solar. We need a broad-based approach, and we need a diversity. But again, 90% was energy that's not affordable, it's not abundant, and it's not reliable.

Let me just shift gears. Mr. Altman, thank you for first of all creating your platform in an open basis and agreeing to stick to the principles of nonprofit status. I think that's very important. Do you think that the internet age did a good job between the beginning of the '90s through the 2000s of protecting children?

I would say not particularly.

And you're a new father, correct? Congratulations.

Thank you very much. He's doing well. It's the most amazing thing ever.

I don't think you want your child's best friend to be an AI bot.

I do not.

So what can we do? How can we work together to protect children?

We've talked a lot about some of the things we're doing here. We're trying to learn the lessons of the previous generation. And that's kind of the way it goes: people make mistakes and you do it better next time. One thing we say a lot internally is we want to treat our adult users like adults. We want to give them a lot of flexibility, we want to let them use the service with a lot of freedom. And for children, there needs to be a much higher level of protection, which means the service won't do things that they might want. Now we're still early, so sometimes people say, 'Oh, you're being too strict on the rules.' And it's just we can't perfectly tell this, but if we could draw a line and if we knew for sure when a user was a child or an adult, we would allow adults to be much more permissive and we'd have tighter rules for children.

So I think what I would ask is if you could have your team commit to working with our teams to make certain that we put together the right framework early on. I think that's the best way we can move forward, because we don't want to overregulate, but we can't repeat the mistakes of the internet and social media era where children got harmed.

We'd be delighted to work with you. It's super important.

Can I say one more thing about what you said? This idea of AI and social relationships, I think this is a new thing that we need to pay a lot of attention to. People are relying on AI more and more for life advice, emotional support, that kind of thing. It's a newer thing in recent months, and I don't think it's all bad, but I think we have to understand it and watch it very carefully.

All right, thank you. And thank you for that commitment. It's very appreciated. I've talked to your team already. Good people. Great. Mr. Intrator, real quickly, can you talk about the intersection between the importance of a robust stablecoin ecosystem here in America and how that has a future with payments and how AI will factor into that? Because I don't think people see how this fits into the broader puzzle.

Thank you for the question. We did start out as a crypto-based company, a hobby that kind of got away from us a little bit. Look, I think that stablecoins, crypto, AI, they share certain DNA in common, which is that they are attempts to build into a future where new technology will make things better for society. And there is a huge potential for us to use stablecoins, crypto, and AI in a combination for better outcomes.

All right, thank you. And that was the quickest coup since 1959.

Senator Klobuchar. Thank you very much, Senator Cruz. A lot of exciting things with AI, especially from a state like mine that's home to the Mayo Clinic, with the potential to unleash scientific research. While we've mapped the human genome and we have rare diseases that can be solved, so there's a lot of positive. But we all know, as you've all expressed, there are challenges that we need to get at with permitting reform. I'm a big believer in that, energy development. Thank you, Mr. Smith, for mentioning this with wind and solar and the potential for more fusion and nuclear. But wind and solar, the price going down dramatically in the last few years. And to get there, we're going to have to do a lot better. I think David Brooks put it the best when he said, 'I found it incredibly hard to write about AI because it is literally unknowable whether this technology is leading us to heaven or hell.' We want to lead us to heaven, and I think we do that by making sure we have some rules of the road in place so it doesn't get stymied or set backwards because of scams or because of use by people who want to do us harm, as mentioned by Senator Cantwell. Senator Thune and I have teamed up on legislation to set up basic guardrails for the riskiest non-defense applications of AI. Mr. Altman, do you agree that a risk-based approach to regulation is the best way to place necessary guardrails for AI without stifling innovation?

I do. That makes a lot of sense to me.

Okay, thanks. And did you figure that out in your attic?

No, that was a more recent thought. Thank you.

Very good. Our bill directs the Commerce Department to develop ways of educating consumers on how to safely use AI systems. Do you agree that consumers need to be more educated? This was one of your answers to your five words, so I assume you do.

Yes, and I think it's incumbent upon us as companies and across the business community to contribute to that education as well.

Okay, very good. Back to you, Mr. Altman. Americans rely on AI increasingly on some high impact problems. To make them be able to trust that, we need to make sure that we can trust the model outputs. The New York Times recently reported earlier this week that AI hallucinations, where models generate incorrect or misleading results, are getting worse. That's their words. What standards or metrics does OpenAI use to evaluate the quality of its training data and model outputs for correctness?

On the whole, AI hallucinations are getting much better. We have not solved the problem entirely yet, but we've made pretty remarkable progress over the last few years. When we first launched ChatGPT, it would hallucinate things all the time. This idea of robustness, being sure you can trust the information, we've made huge progress there. We cite sources. The models have gotten much smarter. A lot of people use these systems all the time, and we were worried that if it was not 100% accurate, which is still a challenge with these systems, it would cause a bunch of problems. But users are smart people. They understand what these systems are good at, when to use them, when not. And as that robustness increases, which it will continue to do, people will use it for more and more things. But we've made, as an industry, pretty remarkable progress in that direction over the last couple of years.

Well, I know we'll be watching that. Another challenge that we've seen, and Senator Cruz and I worked on a bill together for quite a while, and that's the Take It Down Act. That is that we are increasingly seeing internet activity where kids looking for a boyfriend or girlfriend maybe put out a real picture of themselves, it ends up being distributed at their school, or someone tries to scam them for financial gain, or it's AI as we've increasingly seen where it's not even someone's photo but someone puts a fake body on there. And we've had over 20 suicides in one year of young people because they felt like their life was ruined because this was going to be exposed in this way. So this bill we passed through the Senate and the House, the first lady supported it, and it's headed to the president's desk. Could you talk about how we can build models that can better detect harmful deepfakes, Mr. Smith?

Yeah, I mean, we're doing that. OpenAI is doing that. A number of us are. And I think the goal is to first identify content that is generated by AI, and then often it is to identify what kind of content is harmful. And I think we've made a lot of strides in our ability to do both of those things. There's a lot of work that's going on across the private sector and in partnership with groups like NCMEC to then collaboratively identify that kind of content so it can be taken down. We've been doing this in some ways for 25 years since the internet, and we're going to need to do more of it.

And on the issue, last question, Mr. Chair, since the last one was about your bill, I figured it's okay. The newspapers, and you testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Smith, about the bill Senator Kennedy and I had. I still think that there's an issue here about negotiating content rates. We've seen some action recently in Canada and other places. Can you talk about those evolving dynamics with AI developers and what's happening here to make sure that content providers and journalists get paid for their work?

Yeah, it's a complicated topic, but I'll just say a couple things. First, I think we should all want to see newspapers in some form flourish across the country, including in rural counties that increasingly have become news deserts. Newspapers have disappeared. Second, and it's been the issue that we discussed in the Judiciary Committee, there should be an opportunity for newspapers to get together and negotiate collectively. We've supported that. That will enable them to basically do better. Third, every time there's new technology, there is a new generation of a copyright debate that is taking place now. Some of it will probably be decided by Congress, some by the courts. A lot of it is also being addressed through collaborative action. And we should hope for all of these things to strike a balance. We want people to make a living creating content, and we want AI to advance by having access to data.

Okay, thanks. I'll ask other questions on the record. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. Senator Klobuchar asked whether AI will lead us to heaven or hell. It reminded me of a famous observation by Yale law professor Grant Gilmore that in heaven there is no law and the lion will lie down with the lamb. In hell there is nothing but law and due process is meticulously observed. Let me ask you this, and this is to each of the four witnesses. In the race for AI, who's winning, America or China? If the answer is America, how close is China to us, and what do we do to make sure the answer remains America will win? Mr. Altman, we'll start with you.

It is our belief that the American models, including some models from our company OpenAI and Google and others, are the best models in the world. It's very hard to say how far ahead we are, but I would say not a huge amount of time. And I think to continue that leadership position and the influence that comes with that, and all of the incredible benefits of the world using American technology products and services, the things that my colleagues have spoken about here: the need to win in infrastructure, sensible regulation that does not slow us down, the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship that I think is a uniquely American thing in the world. None of this is rocket science. We just need to keep doing the things that have worked for so long and not make a silly mistake.

So I'll speak to it from the physical infrastructure and software stack to deliver that. America is ahead, but it is the Achilles heel from the perspective of the ability to build very large solutions to the computing infrastructure component of this. That is an area that we're going to struggle with from a permitting and building large projects perspective, to be able to deliver the power to allow those building artificial intelligence to continue to move as fast as they can in the race that we're in.

I think the United States has a lead today in what is a close race and a race that will likely remain close. The number one factor that will define whether the United States or China wins this race is whose technology is most broadly adopted in the rest of the world. This is a global market, and it will be defined as technology markets typically are by adoption.

Network effects: 18% of the people in the world live in China, 4% live in the United States, 78% live somewhere else. The lesson from Huawei and 5G is whoever gets there first will be difficult to supplant. We need to export with the right kinds of controls, we need to win the trust of the rest of the world, we need to have the financial architecture that gets not only to the countries that are industrialized but the nations say across Africa where typically China and Huawei have done so well. So some of my colleagues have made reference to standards as something that is desirable, and I will say standards is often code word for regulations. And indeed, the EU stifling standards concerning the internet is what killed tech in Europe. We are seeing now state legislatures mimicking the EU, such as California's SB 1047, which thankfully was overwhelmingly defeated, but would have created essentially a California DMV for AI model registration. How harmful would it be to winning the race for AI if America goes down the road of the EU and creates a heavy-handed prior approval government regulatory process for AI?

I think that would be disastrous. To give a more specific answer to your previous question, which I think touches on why it would be so bad: there are three key inputs to these AI systems: there's compute, all the infrastructure we're talking about; there's algorithms that we all do research on; and there's data. If you don't have any one of those, you cannot succeed in making the best models. And as Brad said, the way for America to influence the world here is to have the technology that people most want to use and most adopt. The world uses iPhones and Google and Microsoft products, and that's wonderful. That's how we have our influence. We don't want that to stop happening. So systems that stop us on any of these areas — if we have rules about what data we can train on that are not competitive with the rest of the world, then things can fall apart. If we are not able to build the infrastructure, and particularly if we're not able to manufacture the chips in this country, the rules can fall apart. If we can't build the products that people want, that naturally win in the market — and I think people do want to use American products, we can make them the best — but if we're prevented from doing that, people will use a better product made from somebody else that doesn't have the sort of stymied approach. So I am nervous about standards being set too early. I'm totally fine with the position some of my colleagues took that standards, once the industry figures out what they should be, it's fine for them to be adopted by a government body and sort of made more official. But I believe the industry is moving quickly towards figuring out the right protocols and standards here, and we need the space to innovate and to move quickly.

Thank you. Senator Curtis? Senator Shurt? Sorry, apologies. No problem. Chairman, thank you for being here. I just want to follow up on the chairman's question. It may be an emerging consensus on the committee. I don't think there's anybody even on this side of the dais that's proposing a sort of European style pre-approval. I think there are some people who would like to do nothing at all in the regulatory space, but I think most people understand that some guardrails — those are the words that you use, Mr. Altman — rules and guardrails are necessary. Are you saying that self-regulation is sufficient at the current moment?

No, I think some policy is good. I think it is easy for it to go too far, and as I've learned more about how the world works, I'm more afraid that it could go too far and have really bad consequences. But people want to use products that are generally safe. You know, when you get on an airplane, you kind of don't think about doing the safety testing yourself. You're like, this is — well, maybe this is a bad time to use the airplane example — but you kind of want to just trust that you can get on.

It's an excellent time to use the airplane example.

But I think your point is exactly right. Look, there is a race, but we need to understand what we're racing for. It also has to do with American values. It's not just a sort of commercial race so we can edge out our near-peer competitor, both in the public sector and the private sector. We're trying to win a race so that American values prevail internationally.

Mr. Smith, I want to move on to another topic. It seems to me that on the consumer side, one of the most basic rights of a user on the internet is to understand what they're looking at or listening to and whether or not it was created solely by a person, a person using an AI, or automatically generated using AI. Do you think a labeling regime — not a prohibition on the use of AI, but just the disclosure, especially as it relates to images, music, creativity — do you think a label would be helpful for consumers?

Generally yes, and I think that's what we in the industry have been working to create. I think you're right to make the distinction and focus especially on images, video, audio files. There's a standard called C2PA that we and a number of companies now have been advancing. It has content credentials; it enables people to know where something was created and who created it. And I think you're right to know whether it was created by a person, by AI, or a person with the help of AI.

I just want to use sort of common language, not the language that all of you use or that we've all learned to use. When you talk about the data as one of the three elements that makes a model work, data really is intellectual property. It is human innovation, human creativity. And I do think we may have a disagreement, and I agree with Senator Klobuchar about the need to understand that these models have been trained on data, but what we're really talking about is human achievement all the way up to now. And I have a deep worry. Look, I'm actually an optimist in the energy space and the public service space, certainly in health innovation. There are a lot of really exciting opportunities here, but we got to pay people for their knowledge. And I am concerned that these models are going to be so successful in spitting out what appears to be knowledge that we're going to, on the back end, not pay people for all of the inputs, and we will have a sort of stalling out of these models. And you talked about attention, but I'm trying to figure out what the tension really is, other than you'd like to pay as little as possible for these inputs. Go ahead, Mr. Smith.

Well, you had me until the last sentence. Look, we create intellectual property, we respect intellectual property, so we're emphatically of the view that intellectual property and the creation of it should be rewarded. Ultimately, intellectual property laws are always about drawing the line. It's really the line that you referred to. In copyright, there is expression that is protected. If you write a book and somebody copies it, then you are entitled to be paid. But there are ideas. If someone reads your book, if someone remembers that Shakespeare wrote a story about two teenagers who fell in love, then that's fair use. That's why this country created it. That's what we need to focus on.

With your permission, Chairman, I want to ask one final question.

Proceed.

Thank you. I'm actually quite excited about the prospect that in 20 years people are going to say, 'Remember when you had to wait on the phone to talk to Kaiser Permanente or the VA?' So, Mr. Altman and Mr. Smith, I want you to — a buddy of mine used to say, 'Paint a picture and paint me in it.' For the government actually delivering services, I want you to describe what an AI agent or AI can do to kind of reduce those pain points that we accept as a fact of life in interacting with the government. It seems to me so much of what makes us irritated with the government is the lack of sorting data that exists somewhere but we can't get access to it. So just very quickly, you have 15 seconds each for some cheerleading.

I can imagine a future where the US government offers an AI-powered service that makes it really easy to use all government services, to get great healthcare, to get great education. You have this thing in your pocket, and if you have any medical problem, you get an answer. If you need to appeal something on some process with the government or file your taxes or whatever, you just do it instantly. You have an agent in your pocket, fully integrated with the United States government, and life is easy.

Anything to add? Remember when you had to stand in line to renew your driver's license? Remember when you didn't know how to report a pothole that needed to be repaired on your street? Remember when you had a fender bender in a car and you had to fill out all these forms and talk to all these people to get insurance coverage? Now you can do it all with one AI system. You can use your phone. And by the way, you can do this today in Abu Dhabi. We need to bring it to America.

Thank you.

Senator Budd? Thank you, Chairman. Again, thank you all for being here. I've enjoyed various conversations with each of you. The ability for the US to deploy new energy generation capacity and upgrade its grid is in many ways the key to the race against China. Energy is how we can win, and it's also how we can lose. Permitting in this country takes too long. China's command and control system means that they will not fail to deploy the energy needed to achieve the scale necessary to develop the most advanced models, which will drive all the benefit of AI. So I'm glad to be working with Senator Lummis on the FREE Act, which would set up a permit-by-rule structure which would let large projects meet comprehensive standards at the front end instead of dragged out on a case-by-case process. So we all want to protect the environment, and we all want to maintain US economic and technological leadership. So Mr. Intrator, what has CoreWeave's experience been in contracting power, and are you concerned that the current permitting system can make it hard for the US to achieve capital investment and the scale needed to win this AI race?

So as you said, access to power, access to scale power, is certainly one of the keys to our ability to win this race. There are others, but it is one that I spent a lot of time thinking about. I separated the comment into access to power and access to scale power because I do think that we are moving towards a period of this race where the size, the magnitude of the infrastructure that is being required to move our artificial intelligence — the labs that are building it, the companies that are building it forward at the velocity that is necessary — is going to be a specific challenge that really requires a lot of thought. We have a huge part of our organization focused on not just getting access to power, but getting access to the size and scale of power that's going to be able to build the infrastructure at the scale of Abilene or close to it in order to allow this to move forward. It's tough, and it will get harder as we move through time because the existing infrastructure that does have some level of elasticity is going to be consumed. Once that is consumed, you're going to get down to a first principle: how do we get power online now? And that's really going to be challenging within the regulatory environment as it is currently configured.

Thank you. Mr. Smith, a similar question. How is Microsoft trying to secure power for its data centers? I mean, we read about that in the news recently, but what does federal policy need to focus on to make sure that we don't lose this race because we can't get enough energy?

Well, we invest to bring more electricity generation onto the grid and then to bring it through the grid to our data centers. We probably have more permitting applications in more countries than quite possibly any company on the planet. Last time I looked at it, it was 872 applications in more than 40 countries. The number one challenge in the United States when it comes to permitting, interestingly enough, is not local, it's not state. It is the federal wetlands permit that is administered by the Army Corps of Engineers. We can typically get our local and state permits done in about 6 to 9 months. The national wetlands permit is taking 18 to 24 months. Both the outgoing Biden administration and the incoming Trump administration have focused on this, but if we could just solve that, we could accelerate a lot here in this country.

Very helpful. Thank you. Mr. Altman, much has been made about the Chinese open source models like DeepSeek. We spoke about that a month or two ago. A concern that I have is that accessible Chinese models promoted by the Chinese Communist Party might be an attractive option for AI application developers to build on top of, particularly in developing world economies. So how important is US leadership in either open-source or closed AI models?

I think it's quite important to lead in both. We realize that OpenAI can do more to help here, so we're going to release an open-source model that we believe will be the leading model this summer, because we want people to build on the US stack. In terms of closed source models, a lot of the world uses our technology and the technology of our colleagues. We think we're in good shape there.

So how could federal policy further help encourage the AI ecosystem to be developed right here in the US?

Well, you touched on a great point with energy. I think it's hard to overstate how important energy is to the future here. Eventually, chips, network gear — that will be made by robots, and we'll make that very efficient and cheaper and cheaper. But an electron is an electron. Eventually, the cost of intelligence, the cost of AI, will converge to the cost of energy. And the abundance of it will be limited by the abundance of energy. So in terms of long-term strategic investments for the US to make, I can't think of anything more important than energy. Chips and all the other infrastructure also, but energy is where this ends up.

Thank you, Chairman.

Thank you. Mr. Smith, I think I'd like to start with you because I thought your point about what exactly is the race — you keep talking about the race, and you framed it in a particular way, saying that it's about adoption in the rest of the world, the 78%. I guess I just wanted to ask you to tease that out some more in terms of understanding what role we could play in Congress, in government, in terms of trying to accelerate and champion that AI adoption internationally.

I think there's two things. The first is it just shines light on the importance of getting it right for export controls, which is the AI diffusion rule that's being discussed right now. And I think what it shows is we want to have, as a country, the kinds of national security controls that ensure that chips don't get diverted to China or get accessed by the wrong users in China for the wrong reasons. That is something that people have drafted at the Department of Commerce. At the same time, we need to say get rid of the quantitative caps that were created for all of these tier 2 countries, because what they did was send a message to 120 nations that they couldn't necessarily count on us to provide the AI they want and need. Just think about it: if this is a critical part of your country's infrastructure, how can you make a bet on suppliers if you're not confident that they'll be able to fulfill your needs? So I think you in Congress and the Senate can help the White House and the Department of Commerce get this right.

Mr. Altman, I wanted your thoughts on this. Is the right part of what you just said in your previous response — that we want other nations to be able to build upon the US AI stack — is that the right framework? Is that what we're thinking about? Or is it more about the consumer? Is it more about getting the rest of the world and the 78% of the population to adopt AI applications that are US? Or is it interrelated?

I think it's heavily interrelated. To me, the stack is from the chips at the bottom to the applications on the top, and we want the whole world on the US stack. We want them to use US chips, we want them to use services like ChatGPT.

Does having other nations building on the infrastructure component of the stack more or less guarantee, or at least have a high likelihood, that then the consumers in that country will be using our products and applications? Is that the sort of theory of the case?

It probably does make it marginally more likely. But I also think if someone's using a stack that we don't trust to train models, who knows what it's going to do? Who knows what sort of back doors would be possible? Who knows what sort of data corruption issues could be possible? I think the AI stack is increasingly going to be a jointly designed system from the chip all the way up to the end consumer product, and lots of stuff in between. I think separating that won't work that well in practice, and we shouldn't want to. Again, I think this point is very critical: the leverage and the power the US gets from having iPhones be the mobile device people most want, and Google being the search engine that people most want around the world, is huge. We talk maybe less about how much people want to use chips and other infrastructure developed here, but I think it's no less important. And we should aim to have the entire US stack be adopted by as much of the world as possible.

When we are looking at our investment into models and building of that nature, how are we doing in terms of development of the applications, the AI tools and applications, that are trying to embed in people's lives? Not necessarily just the overarching models, but do you feel like we're putting the level of intensity that we need to in that type of development?

ChatGPT is the most adopted AI service in the world, not just in the United States but in the world, by a quite significant margin. We're very proud that people like it, and we need to keep pushing on that. I think it's important for all the reasons you just discussed. There are many other US companies building incredible products and services that are also getting globally adopted. This is what the US does best.

Dr. Su, I want to ask one last point to you. Over and over again, each of you is talking about talent as this incredible power but also could be a bottleneck to us. How are we doing when it comes to development of talent in this country? If you were to give us a grade, what would you grade us at in terms of our development right now?

How wide is that delta? If we're talking about this as a race, as you did, is that a space where we have a larger amount of delta, or is that a place where it's closing rapidly too?

That's right.

Senator Schmitt?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Altman, I'll start with you. I really enjoyed and was inspired by your story with the light on and the home you grew up in in St. Louis, and you talked about the spirit of innovation that is the spirit of St. Louis. As a fellow St. Louis native, that's a good story to hear. We just look forward to more investment in St. Louis from your company. That'd be great too. So I'll put a plug in for that. But I do want to ask you specifically: there's a lot made of the comparison between the United States and the regulatory environment and what exists in Europe. What specifically — and I'll open this up to you — what specifically has gone wrong in Europe that we can draw some conclusions from?

First of all, we'd love to figure out how to invest more in St. Louis. I'd love an excuse to get to go home more often. I'll point out one example that I think is just very painful to users. When we launch a new feature or a major new model, we have what is now considered a little bit of an in-joke where we say, 'We have this great new thing, not available in the EU and a handful of other countries,' because they have this long process before a model can go out. And there will be, I believe, great models and services that are quite safe and robust that we will be unable to offer in other regulatory regimes. And if you are trying to be competitive in this new world, and if you are consistently some number of months behind what other people in other countries get access to, that's an example that's extremely painful to users.

And you mentioned your observation that the AI stack may get more vertically integrated. So how does that work then? Because right now, the best estimates are that China is two months to six months behind maybe on large language models, hopefully some of the advances we're seeing in the US. Maybe there's a degree of separation; it's hard to know exactly with DeepSeek. But then you get down to the chips, and that advantage is more like a couple of years, probably something like that. So if that's where we're headed, does that increase the US's advantage in your view, or does that allow China to catch up quicker as we get more vertically integrated?

I think there's a lot of things that can increase US leadership, but we touched on this earlier. I think it's so important. There will be great chips made around the world, there will be great models trained around the world. If the United States companies can win on products and the sort of all of the positive feedback loops that come from how you can improve this once real users are using your products in their daily lives for their hardest tasks, that is something special that is not so easy to catch up with just by doing good chips and good models. So making sure that the US can win at the product level here — obviously I'm talking my book a little bit, but I really do believe it is quite important. And that's in addition to all of the chips, algorithm, infrastructure, algorithms, and data. I think this is a new area where the US is really winning and has a very strong compounding effect.

Thanks. Mr. Intrator, did I pronounce that correctly by the way?

Yep.

Okay, thank you. I want to turn a little bit, staying on this regulatory environment. One of the things I think that's most concerning that's coming out of Europe is this sort of censorship regime that exists not just online but in real life, but certainly it's happening online. People are being arrested for things that they say online. And one of the concerns I have with AI, I suppose, is that if we end up with a place where it's somehow policing 'misinformation' — and I think even in NIST's most recent voluntary standards, one of the risks to be on the lookout for was the spread of misinformation. So the point of the question is: how do we make sure that — I think part of what's going wrong in Europe is it's a funneling of information. And in my view, whether I agree with the point of view or not, it ought to be out there. People can make their own decisions. You combat speech you don't agree with not by censoring it but with more speech. What are some lessons to be learned there and make sure that does not happen here?

So Europe is moving forward with its regulatory regime in a European way. From our seat, where we have to make these enormous capital investments, one of the things about the approach that Europe is taking that we are deeply concerned about every day is the balkanization of how they go about allowing information to flow, how they go about regulating, and how they go about each component of their union having its own set of rules. That will be tremendously challenging in Europe as time goes on because it is really hard to make the magnitude of investments that we need. Beyond that, jurisdictionally — I'm talking about content now. Our role of our company is really kind of below that. Sam and Microsoft are going to get a lot more attention paid to the content level because of the role that they play in the stack. It's not really where we are primarily focused; we're really focused on the investment side of it.

If any of you would like to — Sam, if you or Mr. Altman would like to respond to that, I'd like to get some answer.

I think, well first of all, I strongly agree that people getting put in jail for stuff they say online is very not American, not what we should be doing. AI is quite different than social media, at least in its current evolution. People are using these tools in a sort of one-on-one way instead of this massive thing online. So I think it's easy to make too many analogies, but it's a little bit dangerous to try to talk about AI and the things we're going to face here in the same way that we did for social media. But our stance is that we need to give adult users a lot of freedom to use AI in the way that they want to use it and to trust them to be responsible with the tool. I know there's increasing pressure in other places around the world and some in the US to not do that, but I think this is a tool, and we need to make it a powerful and capable tool. We will of course put some guard rails in very wide bounds, but I think we need to give a lot of freedom.

I'm out of time, but there's a lot more questions there that we'll follow up with. Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you, Senator Hickenlooper. I appreciate that line of questioning. I was ready for you to continue as well; I could have given you a minute or two. Mr. Smith, Microsoft has a long and deep history in transforming workplaces all over the world through software, from the Windows operating system to its office applications like PowerPoint, Excel, and now the AI-powered Copilot application. In software development, life cycles seem to be becoming increasingly shorter, updates becoming more frequent. What are the internal processes that Microsoft follows to evaluate Copilot's accuracy and performance before it was released, and what kind of independent review teams other than Microsoft's own product developers are involved in that? How — who do you bring in to help with that?

Well, first of all, since most of what we're talking about here when you're talking about our Copilots start with models that are developed at OpenAI, I would say OpenAI has its internal process. There is then a joint what's called a DSB, a Deployment Safety Board, where we decide together whether something is safe to deploy, as the name implies. We then at the applications level have our own internal Deployment Safety Board. We have a variety of engineering tools that we use to assess these features. We test these features. We have red teams, meaning sort of competing teams that often go to work to sort of attack the features. And then ultimately the product is released when those tests are completed and the results are satisfactory.

Good. I like that. Well, let me go over to Mr. Altman. Obviously, you all have a natural incentive to ensure that the products are high quality and safe, but the field is so competitive. In applied research and with rigorous testing, these constant improvements really are fundamental steps to the performance of a model. So risk assessments are that key tool. And I'm a big believer in evidence-based technical standards. I've been accused of being the only real scientist who's published peer-reviewed papers in the Senate. So Mr. Altman, do you believe that under appropriate circumstances, independent evaluations based on standards performed by qualified outside evaluators, and done voluntarily, could help validate the testing that you're performing internally and in conjunction with peer companies?

Thank you, Senator, and I think it's awesome that you have published peer-reviewed papers and would love to see more of that.

Well, listen, I was on the Maslow's triangle of science. I was near the bottom. I was a geologist, so that's — you're not high up in that.

Geology is great.

Yes, I think what you say is very important. It's an important part of our process today. External testing helps us find things that we may have missed internally. We're very proud of our safety record on the whole, not that we've been perfect, and we're continuing to learn new things. But I think we do have a process that is leading towards models that the public generally thinks are safe and robust to use. We've developed a lot of techniques to be able to continue to deliver that, but external testers and red teamers are a critical part of that process, and I think they've helped us find many things in the models to improve.

And Mr. Smith, would you add anything to that?

No, okay.

Got it. Someone giving testimony who doesn't have something to add — that's a moment of scientific reflection. Dr. Su, the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act was a historic effort to try and maintain US leadership in emerging technologies like semiconductors, but others as well. As the technology arms race continues globally — and you were talking about this — AMD plays a key role in delivering state-of-the-art designs, the best for the new chips that are going to power electronics and the devices that are going to allow AI to become global. As scientists work around the clock to develop new breakthroughs and try to increase and improve performance, but at the same time shorten R&D timelines, what do you see as the next frontier of chip technology in terms of energy efficiency? And how can — and that's not just based on the Chinese competitors, but how can we work together to improve direct-to-chip cooling for high performance computing?

You bet. All right, I'm out of time. I'll yield back to the chair.

Thank you all. And Senator Hickenlooper, I will say as a Texan whose parents were in the oil and gas business, I think geologists are awesome. We have a consensus.

Senator Curtis, thank you, Mr. Chairman. It's a delight to be here. Mr. Altman, you started a kind of one-upmanship on computers, and I will just tell you in 1985, the month you were born, I was attending a class at Brigham Young University and carried in a laptop and was almost kicked out. What laptop it was? A TRS-80, made by Radio Shack. I upgraded the memory from 40K to 80K, ran on four AA batteries. Incredible. So I'm very envious of your generation. Let me start with you if I would. I think Utah would aspire to lead out with data centers and advanced technologies. Could you just address for states, and in Utah specifically, what it is that makes them attractive to projects like Stargate?

I know that we're having productive discussions about some potential sites in Utah. Power, cooling, fast permitting process, labor force that can build these things — the electricians, the construction workers, the entire stack. A state that wants to partner with us to move quickly. Texas really has been unbelievable on this. I think that would be a good thing for other states to study, but we'd be excited to try to fix something out.

Thank you. I think I could speak for our state leaders; we would be excited as well. But as you know, this also brings challenges, and one of those challenges are the demands for energy. What's your thoughts on how we protect ratepayers and put a little bit of a firewall between them?

I think the best way is just much more supply, more generation. If you make it easy to reasonably profitably create a lot of additional generative capacity, the market will do that. That will not only not drive up rates because of the AI workload, hopefully it'll drive it down for everything. And we've talked a lot about the importance of energy to AI. Energy is just really important to quality of life. One of the things that seems to me the most consistent throughout history is every time the cost of energy falls, the quality of life goes up. So doing a lot to make energy cheaper — in the short term, I think this probably looks like more natural gas, although there are some applications where I think solar can really help. In the medium term, I hope it's advanced nuclear, fission, and fusion. More energy is important well beyond AI. In some sense, we have these dual revolutions going of AI and energy: the ability to have new ideas and the ability to get them done, to make them happen in the physical world where we all live. These are kind of the limiting reagents of prosperity, and let's have a lot more.