THE BUZZ: AI BLUEPRINT — California lawmakers want to regulate the rapidly-evolving field of artificial intelligence. Europe is building out a roadmap for just that. With little action in Washington, state policymakers are looking to the European Union for guidance as they try to set rules for the deep-pocketed tech industry — from national security to child sexual abuse content to election integrity. EU lawmakers have been working for years to check the power of tech giants. Earlier this month, they passed the AI Act, a first-in-the-world legal framework for the technology, which establishes rules in areas where AI could have grave consequences. David Evan Harris, a lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business who teaches AI ethics, spent five years at Meta managing research on responsible AI. He’s now part of the newly-formed California Initiative for Technology & Democracy, or CITED (a group devoted to protecting democracy from risks posed by AI), and has been advising lawmakers in Brussels, Sacramento, Washington and elsewhere on how government should handle advances in artificial intelligence. We caught up with Harris by phone while he was in Europe meeting with leaders at the EU and NATO to talk about AI and philanthropy, to get his take on what California lawmakers should learn from the EU — and what might be next for Silicon Valley. Answers have been edited for length and clarity: On why Europe is so far ahead of California — “The EU started the process of developing the EU AI Act back in 2019. They’re also way ahead of California because they have a budget to do the regulation and to create this new AI office. Gavin Newsom has said that he would prefer that legislation not have any fiscal impact in California because of the state’s budget. So that’s another reason they’ve got a headstart on this — they’ve figured out how to allocate funds. Regulating a technology that is extremely expensive to build and where all the technical experts in the field or most of them are gainfully employed or in high-demand is challenging. And to try to do it within a budget is challenging.” On the differences between Congress and the EU — “There’s a lot of political will to regulate the tech industry in both places. It’s just that the U.S. Congress is really struggling to function at a very basic level. The European Union, they’re very functional and very capable of writing and passing very complex legislation. So, because they’re capable, they’re competent, and they have really impressive teams of experts, they know their stuff. I don’t think they’re afraid to be bold in their regulation because they know that society wants to have democratic institutions with some guardrails and some checks on the power of tech companies.” AI companies want regulation, too, and fast — “AI company CEOs, most of them are asking for regulation.. The California public at large is concerned about the impacts of AI and wants lawmakers to get involved. And it’s incredibly important that we get ahead of this. I heard something at a conference today that I loved: It’s that regulating technology is kind of like dental work. It’s less expensive if you do it early. And the longer you wait, it’s more expensive and the more difficult it gets until you need a whole new tooth. And we don’t have to wait until it’s catastrophic dental surgery. We can do this now.” GOOD MORNING. Happy Monday. Thanks for waking up with Playbook. Now you can text us at 916-562-0685 — save it as “CA Playbook” in your contacts now. Or drop us a line at lkorte@politico.com and dgardiner@politico.com, or on X — @DustinGardiner and @Lara_Korte. | 
