Coalition Urges Senate Not to Let Companies Waive Financial Regulations for AI
The Center for Democracy & Technology joined AI Now Institute, American Civil Liberties Union, and several organizations dedicated to tech policy, consumer protection, and civil rights in a letter to Senate leadership and the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee opposing the “AI Innovation Labs” language in Sec. 10509 of the CLARITY Act.
The letter urges the Senate not to move this language forward in the Senate’s procedural vote set for September 15, 2026. The proposed AI Innovation Labs would allow companies to obtain exemptions from consumer protection laws for AI within their financial services, which would increase risks to consumers’ privacy, financial security, and access to important financial opportunities. Congress should not let companies take advantage of such exemptions to deploy AI without necessary accountability measures to prevent harms to consumers.
As concern about risks and harms related to AI systems continue to grow, a growing chorus of policymakers, industry leaders, and advocates have called for independent AI assessments. This explainer provides an overview of recent proposals for third-party assessment in the United States, including state and federal legislation, executive actions, and industry proposals.
Having third parties assess AI systems might seem like common sense, but crafting effective policies toward this goal can be devilishly tricky. A poorly-constructed ecosystem for third-party assessment could easily fail to consider the most consequential mechanisms of risk, neglect the AI harms that most impact people, or do more to protect AI companies than people.
Not All Guardrails Are Created Equal: Comparing Content Safety and Copyright Filtering
As courts and policymakers work through questions about chatbot liability, they should be wary of analogies that flatten meaningful technical differences. Copyright filtering and safety intervention share real challenges around ambiguity and evasion, but they diverge in what each control must assess, how each manifests over the course of a conversation, and how much can be verified from the outside.
Talking Tech with Roy Austin & Alex Givens on The Future of AI Governance
In this episode of CDT’s Tech Talks, Roy L. Austin, Jr., inaugural director of Howard University School of Law’s AI Initiative, joins Alexandra Givens, President and CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology, to discuss the challenges and opportunities shaping the future of AI.
