European Member of Parliament Dragos Tudorache, a key lawmaker who shepherded the European Union’s legislation on artificial intelligence technologies to a vote, recalls reaching out in 2021 to then-Rep. Jerry McNerney, who was co-chair of the Congressional Artificial Intelligence Caucus.
Tudorache, a lawyer and judge who previously served as Romania’s minister for communications and digital society, wanted to tap U.S. policymakers’ thinking on AI’s impact on workers, industry and society at large. McNerney, who holds a Ph.D. in mathematics, had proposed legislation in 2018 that would have paved the way for AI expertise in government agencies. A 2020 version of the bill, called the AI in Government Act, passed the House but not the Senate.
Similarly, as early as 2018, the European Commission, the executive arm of the 27-member bloc, had proposed regulations aimed at harnessing the power of AI while protecting people’s rights. At the time of Tudorache’s call, only a small group of lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic seemed concerned about the benefits and consequences of what was then considered early-stage tech.
McNerney left Congress in 2023 after 16 years as a lawmaker, citing “grotesque and ugly” partisanship. When asked last September what his colleagues got wrong about AI, he told Roll Call, “They basically don’t understand what it means. Is this some big mind that’s going to take over the world? No. It’s going to enhance people’s productivity. But there is a chance that it could cause displacements in the workforce.”
McNerney, who chaired the caucus for five years, in an interview Tuesday recalled the conversation with Tudorache, saying U.S. lawmakers and their staff showed a “tremendous amount of interest in learning about AI.” But McNerney, now a senior policy adviser at the law firm of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, noted that attendance at caucus meetings dropped off “pretty significantly” after the pandemic and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
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