GALLAGHER OPENING STATEMENT AT HEARING ON AI ON THE BATTLEFIELD

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Representative Mike Gallagher (R-WI), Chairman of the Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation Subcommittee, delivered the following opening remarks at a hearing on artificial intelligence on the battlefield.
 
Rep. Gallagher’s remarks as prepared for delivery:

The subcommittee will come to order. Welcome everyone to today’s CITI subcommittee hearing, “Man and Machine: Artificial Intelligence on the Battlefield.” With the rise of artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT, the United States has been awakened to the power of artificial intelligence—as well as its potential: encompassing both reward and risk.
 
Motivated by fear of the potential risk associated with AI, many industry and government leaders have gone so far as to call for a “pause” on AI development until a set of international regulations guiding this development are established. But more and more, I am convinced that such a pause comes at the even greater risk of losing our razor-thin advantage over the Chinese Communist Party and their military.
 
The CCP has declared that China will be the world’s leader in AI by 2030, around the same timeline Xi Jinping has set for the Chinese military to be capable of taking Taiwan by force and when the Department of Defense predicts China will have quadrupled its nuclear stockpile. The CCP is a regime determined to weaponize AI to threaten global democracy and create the world’s largest techno-totalitarian surveillance state.
 
Do we want AI to be leveraged for good and the deterrence of conflict, or evil and the proliferation of it? If the former, the United States must not “pause.” We must continue developing this revolutionary technology to preserve US technological and moral leadership, and ensure artificial intelligence, and its associated norms and guardrails, are defined by freedom and our ideals, not the CCP’s.
  
Today’s hearing will explore three questions about how man and machine will operate as AI modernizes the battlefield: first, what is the status of AI adoption in the Department of Defense? Second, what are the structural obstacles that prohibit greater adoption and usage of AI across the military? And finally, how can AI be leveraged on the battlefield against the United States by potential adversaries, particularly the CCP?
 
The investments that the US makes in AI today will not only allow us to better process data on the battlefield and allow commanders to make decisions at the speed of conflict; these investments will determine our relevance in writing the rules for AI employment to ensure that the US military remains capable of defending freedom throughout the world.
 
We are joined today by my good friend Alexandr Wang, CEO of ScaleAI; Klon Kitchen, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute; and Dr. Haniyeh Mahmoudian of DataRobot. Thank you all for being here. With that, I will now yield to the Ranking Member, Mr. Khanna, for his opening remarks.