How U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is navigating America's AI future

UNTIL MID-2023, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE was something of a niche topic in Washington, largely confined to small circles of tech-policy wonks.

- WILL HENSHALL

That all changed when, nearly two years into Gina Raimondo's tenure as Secretary of Commerce, ChatGPT's explosive popularity catapulted AI into the spotlight.

Raimondo, however, was ahead of the curve. "I make it my business to stay on top of all of this," she says during an interview in her woodpaneled office overlooking the National Mall on May 21. "None of it was shocking to me."

But in the year since, even she has been startled by the pace of progress. In February 2023, a few months after ChatGPT launched, OpenAI's leadership previewed its latest model, GPT-4, to Raimondo, who used it to write a speech she says was "alarmingly close" to her own prose. Today, tech companies continue to roll out new products with capabilities that would have seemed like science fiction just months earlier. As AI has rocketed up the government's priority list, President Joe Biden made Raimondo point woman, charging her with controlling access to the specialized semiconductor chips required to train the most advanced AI systems and with ensuring that those systems are safe.

With her business-friendly approach, Raimondo, 53, is popular among the leaders of the very companies she's tasked with steering. "She has transformed the Commerce Department [into the] very center of the federal government for a focus on next-generation technology," says Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft and one of Raimondo's many techindustry advisers.