Senators studied AI for a year. Critics call the result ‘pathetic.’

For much of the last year, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer and a bipartisan group of his colleagues have been huddling with tech CEOs, civil rights leaders and top researchers to develop an “all hands on deck” plan to address the urgent threats posed by artificial intelligence.

On Wednesday, the Senate AI Gang, as the group is known, unveiled the fruits of that effort, celebrating a sprawling 31-page road map that calls for billions of new funding in AI research as the “deepest” AI legislative document to date. But consumer advocates are furious about the final product, saying that the document is far too vague about how it will protect people from AI’s harms and that the senators’ initiative is sucking up the oxygen from other efforts to aggressively regulate the technology.