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20510 Dear Chairman Hickenlooper, Ranking Member Blackburn and members of the Subcommittee: Thank you for your decision to hold a hearing on September 12, 2023 titled, “The Need for Transparency in Artificial Intelligence.” My name is Adam Thierer and I am a senior fellow at the R Street Institute. [...] The United States must reject the regulatory approaches being advanced by China, Europe and other nations, which are mostly rooted in a top-down, command-and-control approach to AI systems. [...] Instead, America’s approach to technological governance must continue to be agile and adaptive because there is no one-size-fits-all approach to AI that can preemptively plan for the challenges that we will face even a short time from now.2 At this early stage of AI’s development, government’s role should be focused on helping developers work toward consensus best practices on an ongoing basis.3 I. [...] Transparency and explainability are important values that government can encourage, but these concepts must not be mandated in a rigid, overly prescriptive fashion.8 Algorithmic systems evolve at a very rapid pace and undergo constant iteration, with some systems being updated on a weekly or even daily basis. [...] This is why it is essential that America’s AI governance regime be more flexible, bottom-up, and driven by best practices and standards that evolve over time.9 Beyond encouraging the private sector to continuously refine best practices and ethical guidelines for algorithmic technologies, government can utilize the vast array of laws and regulations that already exist before adding new regulatory m.