- Lead. Senator Josh Hawley convened his Senate Judiciary subcommittee on September 23 for a hearing titled “Always Watching: Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network,” while separately maintaining his refusal to grant AI companies any antitrust exemptions — a dual-front posture that signals Congress’s emerging framework for AI oversight.
- Fact. Hawley invited the CEOs of Flock Safety and three competitors to testify about the company’s AI camera network, which tracks vehicle license plates and movements across thousands of US roads. On antitrust waivers, he has said there is “absolutely no way” he would consent to exemptions for the largest AI labs.
- Stake. Hawley’s simultaneous scrutiny of AI surveillance deployment and AI market concentration points toward a Senate where Big Tech cannot buy regulatory goodwill in one domain by offering concessions in another.
Hawley’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism called four surveillance technology executives to testify on Tuesday, with Flock Safety — whose AI cameras are deployed by thousands of law enforcement agencies across the United States — as the primary subject of scrutiny. The hearing focuses on how private AI surveillance networks have expanded well beyond their original law-enforcement contract boundaries, accumulating datasets on civilian movement that exist outside established Fourth Amendment case law for physical searches.
The Antitrust Exemption Refusal
The hearing follows Hawley’s September 15 response to a lobbying push from major AI labs seeking a narrow exemption from federal antitrust law to allow them to coordinate on safety standards. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had on September 12 called for such a waiver, arguing that safety coordination requires some degree of inter-company communication that could otherwise be deemed collusive.
Hawley rejected the framing entirely. “There is no world in which I will consent to giving the most powerful companies in the history of the world — a small group of three or four of them — antitrust exemptions from our laws so that they can, what, collude together?” he told reporters. His position was echoed by several colleagues across both parties, effectively closing off the waiver path for the remainder of the current congressional session. The FTC chair had similarly warned that labs seeking antitrust immunity are “rigging the market.”
Surveillance Networks and Civil Liberties
Flock Safety’s network is estimated to include more than five million cameras in more than 5,000 US cities and towns, operated through contracts with local police departments and homeowners’ associations. The company’s AI software reads licence plates and creates vehicle history logs that can be queried in real time. Civil liberties organisations have argued that the aggregate effect is a de facto national vehicle-tracking database that citizens have not consented to and that courts have not explicitly approved.
Hawley’s decision to focus on Flock specifically — rather than larger technology companies — reflects a pattern in the current legislative session: scrutiny of how AI infrastructure operates at the street level, not just at the model-training level. The hearing arrives as Congress separately debates whether to renew or revise Section 702 of FISA, which governs domestic intelligence collection, creating a natural legislative context for questions about privately held surveillance data and government access to it.
No legislation was introduced alongside the hearing announcement. But in a political environment where the largest AI labs are simultaneously facing antitrust probes, copyright lawsuits, and safety regulation demands, Tuesday’s subcommittee proceedings add one more vector: the civil-liberties dimension of AI systems that are already deployed in the physical world, not merely under development in a lab.