An AI-Volution: SEC Leans Into Innovation With AI Task Force

The United States and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) is boosting its operations through its plans to create an internal AI task force. According to SEC chair Paul Atkins, the AI task force is expected “to responsibly augment the staff’s capacity, accelerate innovation, and enhance efficiency and accuracy.”

Valerie Szczepanik, the former head of the SEC’s Strategic Hub for Innovation and Financial Technology, has been tapped to lead these efforts.   Ms. Szczepanik had this to say about the internal task force:

I look forward to accelerating work already underway in the SEC’s divisions and offices to build enterprise capacity for AI innovation and implement AI solutions that are trustworthy, effective, and mission enhancing.

This task force represents the SEC’s shift towards “ingraining innovation into [the SEC’s] culture… [to] further [its] mission to protect investors, maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets, and facilitate capital formation.” 

The SEC’s announcement comes on the heels of “Project Crypto” which Atkins unveiled just one day prior.  “Project Crypto” is an initiative involving a set of plans to draft “clear and simple” rules for crypto distributions, custody, and trading.  One of the rule’s key proposed concepts involve an “innovation exemption” allowing “innovators and visionaries…to enter the market immediately… without having to comply with incompatible or cumbersome regulatory requirements that hinder economic activity.  Instead, they will only need to adhere to certain principle-based conditions to achieve the core policy goals of federal securities law.”

The SEC is expected to further lean into innovation as market conditions rapidly change.