Lawmakers are increasingly calling for regulation of artificial intelligence amid whistleblower alarms that the technology could overtake human control, but Congress has no consensus on the best approach.
The rush to figure out how to regulate AI follows employees of AI developers quitting their jobs and warning that the rapidly developing super-intelligence, which can go rogue, could wipe out humanity.
“The call is coming from inside the house. Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway,” said Rep. Lori Trahan, Massachusetts Democrat. “It’s past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and do its job.”
The newfound urgency follows a series of ominous developments, including warnings from an AI worker that “it could kill us all” and hundreds of AI agents independently breaking out of the company’s system and hacking into another internet business.
Ms. Trahan partnered with GOP Rep. Jay Obernolte of California on a comprehensive framework for regulating AI, but it has not gained widespread traction among their colleagues.
As part of that framework, they introduced the Frontier Risk Oversight, National Transparency, Independent Evaluation, and Reporting, or FRONTIER, Act.
The measure requires major AI developers to publish frameworks for assessing and addressing catastrophic risks and transparency reports on the capabilities and restrictions of its models, which would be subject to annual independent compliance audits.
The FRONTIER Act also creates a new under-secretary position at the Department of Commerce to oversee AI Security and requires developers to report to that person any critical safety incidents or catastrophic risks arising from their models.
In the Senate, Commerce Chairman Ted Cruz, Texas Republican, has worked with Majority Leader John Thune, South Dakota Republican, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota Democrat, on legislation to establish a federal framework for addressing advanced AI risks.
“It would require government supervision and approval before they can be implemented,” Mr. Cruz said Wednesday on ABC’s “The View.”
Asked if the bill could pass, the senator conceded he did not know.
“It is possible, but it ain’t easy,” Mr. Cruz said. “This is a very divided time.”
A recent cascade of warning signs pushed AI regulation to the forefront.
Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old AI researcher at Anthropic who previously worked at OpenAI, quit the industry last week and warned that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Around the same time, Mrinank Sharma, an AI safety leader at Anthropic, resigned and gave the cryptic warning that the “world is in peril.”
In July, AI went rogue. Hundreds of OpenAI’s AI agents broke out of a testing sandbox on their own, without any human directing them, and used stolen credentials to hack into the servers of Hugging Face, an internet machine learning hub. It was the first publicly documented case of AI agents autonomously breaching an outside company’s systems.
After the Hugging Face hack, nearly 1,400 AI company employees signed an open letter they dubbed “Pacing the Frontier” that urged federal regulation. The letter was signed by workers at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta.
OpenAI and Anthropic formally endorsed the letter as companies, not just individual employees.
Mr. Cruz had planned for his committee to mark up the AI bill in July alongside a handful of kids online safety bills, but did not have enough bipartisan buy-in to proceed.
The top Democrat on the Commerce Committee, Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell, has not endorsed the measure.
Ms. Cantwell said in a social media post on Thursday she is glad to see Republicans “suddenly waking up to the urgent need for tough AI safety rules” after Mr. Cruz and leaders tried to pass a 10-year moratorium on state AI regulations last year.
“But the answer is not a weak federal standard that becomes a backdoor for wiping out stronger state protections,” she said. “Meaningful legislation would require the most powerful AI models undergo testing by scientists and experts at our national laboratories to assess whether they could enable sophisticated cyberattacks or aid the development of biological or nuclear weapons.”
Some lawmakers, such as Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn, are questioning if it is even feasible for Congress to regulate AI, given how rapidly the technology is evolving.
“Assuming Congress knows enough to pass wise and effective regulation,” Mr. Cornyn said in a Friday social media post, “will our adversaries play by the same rules?”
Sen. Ruben Gallego, Arizona Democrat, suggested the Senate establish a select committee on AI to evaluate how Congress can keep up.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority on par with pandemics and nuclear war,” he said. “We can’t wait for a catastrophic failure, widespread economic disruption, or a national security crisis before building the capacity to understand and respond to this technology.”
Several states have laws requiring AI audits, but there is no federal standard.
President Trump has been reticent to go too far in regulating AI. He signed an executive order in June to develop a voluntary system under which AI companies can share models with the government for risk analysis prior to public release, but the main goal of that was to address cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
Asked Thursday whether he has any concerns that AI could lead to human extinction, the president said, “No, I don’t have any.”
“I have concerns that if we don’t win AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position,” Mr. Trump said. “We are leading China right now by a pretty good period. I would say a year, which is, you know, considered a lot.”
Contact the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.