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Congress Confronts AI as Lawmakers Warn of 'Catastrophic Risk'
ReCongress Confronts AI as Lawmakers Warn of 'Catastrophic Risk'
Members of Congress are under growing pressure to pass federal AI safeguards after a former Anthropic researcher warned that artificial intelligence could extinguish humanity within a decade. Bipartisan talks have produced a Senate roadmap, but no legislation has reached the floor.
Members of Congress returned to Washington this week facing mounting pressure to regulate artificial intelligence, after a former Anthropic researcher publicly warned that AI could extinguish humankind within a decade. The claim, which followed reports that a swarm of OpenAI agents escaped isolation and hacked the platform Hugging Face, has jolted Capitol Hill and intensified long-simmering fears that lawmakers are falling dangerously behind the technology they are supposed to oversee.
Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., who has worked on bipartisan AI legislation, said the whistleblower's warning has become a tipping point. «My phone has been ringing off the hook from a lot of colleagues who really saw the news of the whistleblower as a tipping point,» she said. «Then people hear the words 'human extinction.' When they hear loss of control. When they hear 'catastrophic risk,' I think people are waking up and they're saying, 'Where the hell is Congress?'»
Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., an AI expert who has worked on guardrails with Trahan, pushed back on the idea that lawmakers have been idle. «It's not like we've been sitting on our hands here,» he said. «I don't think it's fair to say that there's been a reluctance to act. It's just that the wheels of progress turn very slowly in Congress.»
The apocalyptic scenarios now circulating on Capitol Hill are not limited to abstract risks. Lawmakers have described fears of AI seizing control of water systems, subways, air traffic control, crashing planes, and even firing nuclear weapons. Suspicion about data centers has long percolated among voters, and the recent incidents have given those concerns new urgency.
Congress has rarely been ahead of technological innovation, and AI is no exception. OpenAI founder Sam Altman has visited Capitol Hill at least five times between 2023 and today, meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., as recently as June. «This is sort of an important, urgent and in some ways unprecedented moment and I think we really need the government to lead,» Altman said during a 2023 visit.
When Democrats held the majority between 2023 and 2025, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., convened regular bipartisan symposia on AI, bringing in Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates to educate senators. Schumer repeatedly said legislation would come in months, not years. In May 2024, he and Sens. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., and Todd Young, R-Ind., produced a policy roadmap titled «Driving U.S. Innovation In Artificial Intelligence.» Hopes that provisions could be attached to a must-pass bill in the fall of 2024 went nowhere.
Johnson said in a September 2024 interview that he and Schumer see the world differently. «Chuck Schumer and I see the world with very different lenses. He always wants to have a growth of government approach to everything,» Johnson said. «I think the reaction or the knee-jerk reaction perhaps of the Senate would be to just go in and overlay this with red tape. And we're not going to do that in the House.»
Now a group of Democrats is urging Johnson to keep the House in session this fall until it adopts «meaningful AI safeguards.» Rep. Sam Liccardo, D-Calif., says urgent action is necessary to stop AI from spiraling out of control. «We need to do it fast, because otherwise this can be very dangerous,» said Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va.
Despite the apprehension, it remains far from clear that Congress will move immediately. Obernolte believes the recent AI incidents could spark action. «I think that this increases not only visibility, but the sense of urgency in getting a federal regulatory framework passed this year,» he said. Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., who is pursuing a master's degree in AI at George Mason University, said the threat is dire but acknowledged lawmakers do not yet know what legislation will fix it. «Because it's so new, we don't actually know what kind of legislation will fix it,» Beyer said. «So I think we're going to introduce imperfect and pass imperfect legislation, see what it does, and then learn as we go.»
Obernolte said the AI agents that broke out of their controlled environment did so because the model «intentionally had its safety controls removed.» The question now is whether Congress can learn fast enough to keep pace with a technology that is developing on its own terms.
