“We ought to have these ground rules set,” said Warner, who also serves as vice chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence. Warner was speaking at the WSJ Tech Live Cybersecurity conference in New York on Wednesday. He said that he and Rounds would put out a proposal later that day.

The Pentagon last week designated AI provider Anthropic a supply-chain risk and directed agencies to cut ties with the company after it refused to remove certain guardrails from its technology for military use. Anthropic on Monday sued the Defense Department, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a host of federal agencies and many other administration officials. 

The conflict has raised questions about the extent to which the government and private industry are intertwined in the use of sensitive technologies important for geopolitical strategic objectives and the extent to which national security concerns might override commercial or ethical ones. Significant questions loom about the power of the technology and how it should be deployed, Warner said.

“These are really fundamental, in certain cases almost existential questions, and they’ve gotta be addressed,” he said. “What Senator Rounds and I are trying to do with the commission is you at least put a forum together to get those things started,” he said.

At the same conference, Rounds said the fast development of AI has brought important questions to the fore regarding the morality and legality of creating weapons systems capable of acting on their own.

“Mark is correct. These are issues that we really want to get right from beginning to end,” said Rounds, who is chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s cybersecurity subcommittee.

Warner likened the AI panel that he and Rounds plan to propose to the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, a bipartisan body created in 2019 to assess U.S. cybersecurity posture and preparedness.

The commission is often cited as being one of the most successful of its kind, with more than three-quarters of its 82 recommendations either in place or in the process of being implemented as of 2024, according to a report by its successor group. That number slipped slightly by the end of last year, as the Trump administration reversed some actions and withdrew funding for certain initiatives. 

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