This article originally appeared at Green Tape.
This past November, the US-China Economic Security and Review Commission released their annual report to Congress. The whole document spans 793 pages and includes upwards of thirty recommendations, but the bombshell is right at the top:
The Commission recommends:
I. Congress establish and fund a Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to racing to and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capability. AGI is generally defined as systems that are as good as or better than human capabilities across all cognitive domains and would usurp the sharpest human minds at every task.
It’s striking that, just four years after GPT-3 was released, the AI arms race has been elevated to the top of the Commission’s priority list. But here at Green Tape, we’re terminally permitting-brained, and thus the concept of a “Manhattan Project for AI” brings up just one question: “Won’t all of this trigger NEPA?”
The answer is yes—and not just NEPA, but the whole host of environmental laws that generally constrain development in the United States. Now, I’m optimistic about the next few years—Congress and the executive branch have the opportunity to make it significantly easier to build the several-GW data centers that we’ll need to train cutting-edge frontier models. But in such a scenario that we need to rapidly (say, in less than a year) scale up government-led AI and its supporting infrastructure to counter Chinese efforts, we’ll also have to leverage some good old statutory exemptions and waiver authorities.
While this isn't an exhaustive list, and there are some precedential gray areas for what sorts of informal regulatory arrangements are legal (see: Project XL), what follows is a pretty comprehensive overview of the clearly-established, clearly-important exemptions across four major environmental laws: NEPA, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.
