Alexandr Wang, Scale AI CEO

00:00Members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to be here today to discuss the steps that must be taken to ensure US leadership in AI. My name is Alexander Wang. I'm the founder and CEO of Scale AI. Today's hearing is personal for me. I grew up in Los Alamos, where my parents were physicists at the National Lab, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. They taught me that America's leadership in science and technology is vital to our national security and global strength. At MIT, I learned that progress in AI depends on three key elements. data, compute and algorithms. While most of my classmates pursued expertise in comput and algorithms, few were focused on the data challenge. That inspired me

00:39to start scale. We deliver expert level data and offer technology solutions to leading AI labs, multinational enterprises, and the US government and our allies. At scale, we keep humans at the center of everything we do because AI should always work for us, not the other way around. Over the past decade, it's become clear that the United States faces intense global competition in determining how AI should evolve and who should lead. In 2018, the Chinese Communist Party's AI master plan started taking shape. They were already developing advanced AI capabilities and using that technology to surveil and suppress their people. Fast forward to today, their plan is more sophisticated and expansive. It includes four key

01:24areas of focus. First, the CCP is taking a whole of country approach, having recently launched their AI plus initiative. Second, the CCP is outinvesting us in data, spending billions on AI ready data and unlocking vast public data sets to fuel AI systems. Third, they're finding ways to catch up on compute and building out their physical infrastructure. And lastly, they're developing leading AI models and exporting them to the world. But we are not here today to just talk about what China is doing, but to identify how the US can lead. Given how close the competition is across all foundational elements, the policies this Congress promotes could determine the outcome. Global AI dominance is not about trying to level the playing field

02:09by mimicking China's authoritarian way of government and AI adoption. Instead, the United States must chart our own course, one that is anchored in American values. This is vital to our long-term national security. This requires decisive action by the United States across four main themes. Dominate, unleash, innovate, and promote. To dominate, we need to win on data. The US government is one of the largest producers of data in the world, but currently most of that data is unavailable to advance American AI leadership. There are three immediate actions that would move us forward towards data dominance. First, establish a national AI data reserve. This resource should serve as a centralized hub for the government's AI work,

02:51housing relevant government data and allowing it to be easily shared between agencies and enabling widespread AI adoption. Second, make all government data AI ready and stand up AI data infrastructure to enable scaled implementation. And third, Congress should invest to position data dominance as a national priority. The next theme is unleash, meaning we must unleash AI technology and establish an agentic government. An agentic government is one that uses AI under human supervision to enhance its operations. For example, federal agencies could leverage AI to streamline veteran healthcare paperwork, improve improve fraud detection at the IRS, and boost efficiency and information sharing across agencies.

03:32This will improve the lives of public employees and the American people. Congress require each agency to set up at least one flagship agent government program. Next, we must maximize the ability of companies to innovate. I believe the right regulatory framework is one that allows for innovation while still creating proper guardrails. Congress should take three actions. First, confirm a use casebased regulatory framework and conduct an analysis to address regulatory gaps. Second, establish one single federal AI governance standard to avoid patchwork legislation at the state level. And third, implement policies that enable American workers to become the AI workforce of the future. These policies

04:14would provide the skills necessary to train, fine-tune, and evaluate AI systems. The final theme is promote, meaning we need need to promote US technology globally. Countries around the world, what I call AI geopolitical swing states, will soon be forced to choose between Western or CCP controlled technology. To help make sure they choose western technology, Congress and the administration should empower NIST to complete all relevant measurement science for AI and export it to the world through the global network of AI safety institutes. America led the industrial revolution, the space race, the internet a and the internet age. AI is the next frontier and with your assistance, I'm confident we will lead again. Thank you for the

04:56opportunity to be here today and I look forward to your questions.