Joe Dalia

With a little over a week remaining before the end of my 10 years of service in the Nevada Legislature, I’ve had some time to reflect. I’m certainly proud of all that we have accomplished for the state over the past decade. We’ve come a long way. But I’m most proud to have worked alongside so many amazing public servants. This includes fellow elected officials, many of whom I had the pleasure of recruiting and mentoring. But this also includes legislative and campaign staff, state and local government employees, and members of the private and non-profit sector. Almost without fail, the people doing this work come to it with good intentions, humble hearts, and a passion for service. You can’t ask for more than that. No one accomplishes anything entirely on their own. I am no exception. The credit for any successes I have enjoyed rightly belong to many. I am incredibly grateful for each of you who has traveled this road with me, both on the campaign and official side. I could not have done it without you. Thank you for gifting me the opportunity to serve and for believing in our mission. Being Speaker is truly the pinnacle of service in the Nevada Assembly. But it is not what I treasure most when I think about my time in the Legislature. Instead, it is the relationships formed, the memories made and the challenges overcome because of the strength of those relationships, and the way in which the Assembly (and its members) conducted itself while I had the honor to lead, bolstered by a profoundly talented and dedicated leadership team. We did our best to lead and serve with kindness, compassion, and empathy. While the Assembly is losing quite a bit of legislative experience this cycle, I am confident in the future of the Nevada Legislature. New leadership is ready to step up to face the challenges of today and tomorrow. And great people are running for the state legislature every cycle, despite the challenges and sacrifices. Nevada is in good hands and her future is bright. I am an unabashed believer in our country’s state legislative institutions because they are the bodies doing the policy work in this country and they have shown themselves to be incredibly resilient over the past 250 years. I recently had an opportunity to reflect on state legislative institutions and my role in strengthening them, in Athens, Greece, the birthplace of Democracy. Watch the video to hear my thoughts and the challenge I issue to each of you. Serving the people in the Legislature has been an honor and a privilege. While this is goodbye for now, I hope our paths cross again in the future and that we are both changed for the better as a result. Godspeed and God bless each and every one of you.

Bob Seale, the one-time chairman of the Nevada Republican Party, has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission against David Flippo, raising questions about his personal finances and campaign finance reports. More here: washingtonpost.com/politics/…

Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books — a point @FTC emphasized repeatedly during my tenure. 1. There is an extensive set of laws that govern dangerous and defective products. For example, releasing unvetted AI models or agents can violate consumer protection laws. Shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an “unfair or deceptive” act or practice under the FTC Act (and analogous state laws). And some state AGs are already exploring holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity. 2. Existing laws also prohibit “unfair methods of competition.” This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools. It can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same. As the Supreme Court has noted: “A method of competition which casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the [unfair methods of competition] statute was aimed." 3. The highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We had started investigating these partnerships and cross-investments across the stack (and released a preliminarily overview of some findings: ftc.gov/news-events/news/pre…). Both federal and state enforcers should be scrutinizing these opaque relationships and inter-dependencies. We are already seeing how these relationships could undermine accountability. For example, OpenAI could face liability given the Hugging Face incident, but Hugging Face being bought up by Nvidia means that we’re unlikely to see it file a lawsuit over this — given Nvidia’s strong incentive to see OpenAI continue full speed ahead. 4. As AI tools dramatically change the landscape of cybersecurity risks and hacks, all businesses should be doubling down on having core security protections in place. Firms that fail to invest in adequate data security measures or fix known vulnerabilities can also be breaking the law. A recent analysis showed that around 1/3 of Fortune 100 companies do not even have a way to notify them about security issues. During my @FTC tenure, we sued firms for poor data security practices and held CEOs liable when they were personally responsible. this.weekinsecurity.com/doze… ftc.gov/news-events/news/pre… 5. As policymakers consider new legal regimes, we should be looking to lessons from prior efforts to govern major sectors, such as banking and other networks, platforms, and utilities. Tools like structural separations, nondiscrimination, and supervision could be key, and there’s a rich history of what works and what doesn’t. But we can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws.

Nevada business reporters should note the difference in the comments from the two candidates for Secretary of State concerning the creation of a Nevada business court (last question in the story). thenevadaindependent.com/art… via @TheNVIndy @eric_neugeboren