Opening remarks will be delivered by Eric D. Reicin, President and CEO, BBB National Programs, followed by a keynote discussion. 

Congressman Bill Foster, appointed this year to the bipartisan House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence, will share his background as a PhD physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Lab, discuss his perspective from his experience on the Task Force, outline his AI priorities, and discuss his vision for the road ahead.  

The Frontier Model Forum (FMF), established in 2023 and comprising Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI, is an industry non-profit focused on the safe development of AI models. In this session, FMF executive director Chris Meserole will discuss FMF’s work, frontier model development and its current state, and why shared best practices for safety are so important to further AI progress.

Professor Gary Marchant has identified the Pacing Problem – a well-established phenomenon in which the pace of technological discovery and innovation consistently exceeds the development of its governance framework. Professor Marchant will discuss his research regarding self-regulation's ability to address the Pacing Problem and will address various potential self-regulatory models. 

This year, the US Supreme Court issued several decisions limiting federal agency discretion and enforcement, including overruling “Chevron deference”. The collective impact of the decisions in reshaping the framework for the modern federal administrative state is potentially enormous. This session will examine the implications of these decisions for industry self-regulation and actions by state Attorneys General. 

Industry self-regulation has long been a feature of the movie, music, and video game industries through the implementation of content labeling and ratings systems. Now social media platforms are facing public scrutiny, with calls for action to protect youth safety, but these efforts face significant First Amendment obstacles. This session will discuss the case for and against industry self-regulation of social media, including discussion of a paper authored by Dr. Nicol Turner-Lee.

Successful models of industry self-regulation must be able to adapt and evolve over time.  This session will explore the shift of the soft law AI governance frameworks implemented by the Singaporean and Japanese governments from a domestic rules-based regime to a more region-wide system and what this development may mean for emerging AI regulatory paradigms in the US and EU. 

How AI will be regulated is a question that will likely be answered with both hard and soft law solutions. In this session speakers will examine the FTC’s historical encouragement of soft law, the possibility of accountable industry self-regulation solutions for AI, and the potential role of other government agencies in enabling industry self-regulation of AI. 

Today’s youngest generations are digital natives – they have never lived without the internet. In this session, our panelists will break down the ways children today participate online, focusing on the areas where application of the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act is a particular challenge, such as new platforms and technologies, and will explore how industry self-regulation can help. 

Precisely because of the critical role that it plays, no form of regulation is without criticism. Those models of soft or hard law that have succeeded are those that have grown and evolved from lessons learned. This session will be a case study of such lessons and growth, featuring the American Chemistry Council’s Responsible Care program, in operation for more than 30 years, and other environmental protection programs. 

The financial services industry has among the oldest and most well-established traditions of industry self-regulation in the securities market, dating back to 1939. On this panel, speakers will explore modern examples of industry self-regulation in financial services, including its use in the debt buying industry, its potential among in the mortgage broker industry, financial services generally and other specific use cases.

This presentation will focus on how Virginia’s nation-leading regulatory reform efforts have drastically reduced regulatory restrictions and saved citizens hundreds of millions of dollars (while maintaining needed public health and safety measures) and on the critical role that industry leaders play in that process.