Jay Obernolte

Jay Obernolte (born 1970) took an unusual road to Congress: a Caltech engineering degree, a UCLA master’s in artificial intelligence, and three decades running FarSight Studios, the video game company he founded at 19. Elected to represent California’s high desert in 2020, the Republican is routinely described as the only member of Congress who has actually built the technology his colleagues are trying to regulate.

The task force report

In 2024 Speaker Mike Johnson and Leader Hakeem Jeffries tapped Obernolte to chair the House Bipartisan Task Force on Artificial Intelligence with Democrat Ted Lieu as co-chair. Its 273-page report, delivered December 17, 2024, became the reference document for congressional AI thinking: sector-specific oversight by existing regulators rather than a new AI agency, incremental legislation over sweeping frameworks, and a warning against copying Europe’s precautionary model. Obernolte summarized the philosophy at the release — regulate outcomes, not tools — and stressed the report was a beginning, not a final word.

He has kept working the problem from the pragmatic center, introducing consolidated AI bill packages with Lieu in 2026 and arguing that federal preemption of the state-law patchwork must come paired with actual federal standards. Consumer advocates fault the light-touch creed for leaving present-day harms — deepfakes, algorithmic discrimination — largely to the states he would preempt; Obernolte counters that miswritten federal law would entrench incumbents and smother the startups AI policy claims to protect.