The first U.S. Senate AI Insight Forum was a lively event, with xAI’s Elon Musk calling for a federal department of artificial intelligence while Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg emphasized a need for transparency and Google’s Sundar Pichai stressed AI’s potential to improve the human condition with regard to things like health and energy. The three-hour meeting was organized by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) who said the crash course would address both how AI “enriches our world and opens the door to new prosperity” and how society can “minimize the very real risks.”

“The meeting — also attended by Bill Gates, a founder of Microsoft; Sam Altman of OpenAI; Satya Nadella of Microsoft; and Jensen Huang of Nvidia — was a rare congregation of more than a dozen top tech executives in the same room,” reports The New York Times, characterizing it as “one of the industry’s most proactive shows of force in the nation’s capital as companies race to be at the forefront of AI and to be seen to influence its direction.”

The effort to draft comprehensive AI regulation will require a bipartisan Congressional effort, as well as input from “skeptics from outside the industry — like those from labor and civil rights communities — and skeptics from inside the industry who have the necessary technical experience to help us understand the changes that might be needed,” Schumer said, adding that “without a wide array of perspectives our efforts will fall short.”

Senate AI Caucus co-chair Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico), who was active in forming the National AI Research Resource Task Force (NAIRR), co-hosted the inaugural event, along with Senators Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota) and Todd Young (R-Indiana).

According to Reuters, more than 60 senators took part in this first Forum (apparently the evolution of Schumer’s SAFE AI listening sessions).

CNBC reports that Musk believes a federal AI bureau “could operate similarly to the Federal Aviation Administration or the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, adding that those in the space had to be ‘proactive while reactive.’”

As part of what The New York Times called “a packed week of AI announcements in Washington,” eight new companies — including Adobe, IBM, Palantir, Nvidia and Salesforce —  joined Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection AI, Microsoft and OpenAI in vowing to abide by voluntary AI safety, security and trust standards.

The new companies have agreed to “to ensure internal and external testing before product release,” watermarking and other things, reports Axios. A number of the firms subsequently united to create the Frontier Model Forum.

In other AI news, the G20 countries pledged “responsible AI development” at a September 10 meeting in India that was reported on by Bloomberg and others. “Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the G20 countries should develop a framework for ‘human-centric’ AI rules, while European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for a regulatory body similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” wrote Pymnts.