A string of terrifying warnings from the artificial intelligence community has put Congress, the White House and the AI industry on notice: Slow the progress of the rapidly developing technology before swarms of bots take over the internet and “kill all humans.”
President Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, Louisiana Republican, responded to the warnings Sunday by acknowledging that “guardrails” on AI are needed, or in the president’s case, acceptable.
“We can put up guardrails. We can do this and that,” Mr. Trump said while visiting Ireland. “But I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing up things that won’t happen.”
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Mr. Trump tepidly agreed to federal regulations on AI just hours after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote a post warning that building AI too quickly is “reckless” and poses significant risks.
Mr. Amodei said the July incident in which hundreds of OpenAI’s AI agents went rogue and breached Hugging Face’s systems could be replicated on a much larger scale within a year.
“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails,” Mr. Amodei wrote.
SEE ALSO: Trump says he would agree to ‘guardrails’ for artificial intelligence
House and Senate lawmakers are now scrambling to respond to the warnings, even as they face intense pressure from Mr. Trump to avoid impeding the U.S. in the race with China to dominate AI.
“We’re leading China in AI,” Mr. Trump said Sunday. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”
Mr. Johnson echoed the president’s view as he made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows.
Mr. Johnson said he has talked with all the leaders in AI, and they agree that guardrails for the technology are needed but have different ideas on how to implement them.
“We have to put up some guardrails, some safety measures in place to ensure that we don’t have an out-of-control artificial general intelligence,” Mr. Johnson said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “But at the same time, we’ve got to make sure that we don’t lose our edge in the global competition on this with China. Because that would be a national security threat.”
House Democrats, who are in the minority but poised to win back the gavel in November, called on Congress to take immediate action to slow the development of AI.
SEE ALSO: Schumer to Trump: What are you doing to stop unchecked AI power?
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Democrat, told ABC’s “This Week” that Congress must take “decisive action now” to slow down the pace of AI development. He blamed Republicans for dismantling an AI task force last year and said lawmakers should not adjourn to campaign for the midterm elections without first addressing the AI threat.
Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent, and some Democrats have proposed banning certain forms of AI. Rep. Ted Lieu, California Democrat, introduced legislation mandating that companies develop and maintain a “kill switch” to stop rogue AI.
Mr. Jeffries said that when Democrats huddle Tuesday when Congress reconvenes, “a high priority will be action on artificial intelligence.”
The rush to figure out how to regulate AI follows employees of AI developers quitting their jobs and warning that the rapidly developing superintelligence could wipe out humanity.
Jacob Coxon, 27, an AI researcher who recently left Anthropic after joining from OpenAI, announced his departure from the industry last week, warning that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
In February, Mrinank Sharma, head of the Safeguards Research Team at Anthropic, announced his resignation on X, warning that “the world is in peril” from AI and interconnected crises.
Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic’s Alignment Science team as a current employee, backed up Mr. Coxon’s warning in a post on X: “Jacob is correct here, we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it will be greater than 10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are clearly not on track to.”
In July, AI went rogue. Roughly 700 of about 1,200 AI agents broke out of a testing sandbox on their own, without any human directing them, and used stolen credentials to hack into the production systems 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, more than 1,100 employees of AI companies signed an open letter, published July 28 and dubbed “Pacing the Frontier,” urging federal regulation. The number of signatories has since grown to more than 1,380. The letter was signed by workers at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and Meta.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic formally endorsed the petition at the corporate level, going beyond individual employee signatures.
Mr. Amodei proposed a three-step plan to slow the pace of AI development and improve safety, and other AI tech leaders backed him.
“I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X. “We will have more to share soon.”
Elon Musk posted on X that “Dario is right.”
On Capitol Hill, attempts to regulate artificial intelligence have stalled.
Reps. Lori Trahan, Massachusetts Democrat, and Jay Obernolte, California Republican, introduced the Frontier Risk Oversight, National Transparency, Independent Evaluation, and Reporting Act, known as the FRONTIER Act, as part of a comprehensive AI regulatory framework, though the measure has struggled to gain broad traction.
The measure requires major AI developers to publish frameworks for assessing and addressing catastrophic risks, and transparency reports detailing the capabilities and limitations of their models, all of which would be subject to annual independent compliance audits.
In the Senate, Commerce Committee 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 to address advanced AI risks.
Mr. Cruz acknowledged on ABC’s “The View” that passing the bill would not be easy.
Some lawmakers, such as Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, are questioning whether 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 social media post, “will our adversaries play by the same rules?”
• Lindsey McPherson contributed to this report.
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