AI Lobbying Reaches All-Time High With 185% Increase From Last Year, Alarming Study Proves

A new and alarming study has taken center stage and it has proven how AI lobbying has attained record-breaking figures.

The surge in AI lobbying that arose in 2023 was so massive that figures depicted a whopping 185% rise from stats seen in 2022. The change is huge and in the past, we saw close to 158 different firms participating and now, it’s nearly 450 different companies that are a part of the activity which has experts talking.

The news comes to us thanks to federal lobbying findings that were analyzed by the likes of OpenSecrets in collaboration with CNBC.

The huge rise in AI lobbying arrives at a time when there are more calls for regulating AI and now, we’re watching President Biden’s admin start codifying such regulations. Remember, firms that started lobbying during the start of 2023 wished to have a word on how regulation would impact the businesses entailing the likes of TikTok and Tesla.

Others that were a part of the list included Spotify, Shopify, Pinterest, Samsung, Nvidia, Dropbox, DoorDash, Palantir, Instacart, OpenAI and more. So as you can see, the list is quite comprehensive.

There are hundreds of firms that ended up being lobbied across AI last year and they followed suit from leading AI startups and tech giants, but that was not all. We saw insurance firms, finance companies, pharma companies, academia, and even telecom become a part of this.

Until the start of 2017, we saw a leading number of firms reporting about AI lobbying, and that stood across single digits. As per this report, we’re seeing how the move keeps growing at a steady pace but with time, it would increase further.

A whopping 330 different firms were witnessed lobbying against AI in the past year and they ended up doing this in 2022 as well. The information put out a range of industries with new entrants arising in this lobbying system and that had names like AMD and TSMC.

Other names on the list included the likes of Disney and Appen. There were companies reporting lobbying across other AI issues on many other matters that related to the government.

As a whole, they spoke about spending close to $957 million in just 2023 alone on a series of matters as per reports from OpenSecrets.

Then in the month of October, we saw President Biden mentioning more in detail about executive orders entailing AI and how the American government took on actions that were new and unique. It required safety assessments and guidance about civil rights as well as AI research and what effect it would have on today’s labor market.

The goal was now to give rise to a system featuring guidelines for examining particular AI models and this entailed testing environments related to them. They would partly be in charge of creating consensus-dependent standards related to AI.

After executive orders were rolled out, there was a lawmaker frenzy with many industry groups and labor unions as well as certain others digging into a massive 100-page long document that made particular notes on priorities as well as particular deadlines.

During the start of December, we’ve seen the NIST rollout public comments from many firms including how they would like to shape regulations. There were specific responses related to how particular AI standards would be created and how AI systems could be best tested.

It would manage risks pertaining to generative AI and how it assists in limiting risks related to fake content made through AI.