Reporter’s Notebook: Congress meets AI as fears of human extinction jolt Capitol Hill

Members of Congress returned to Capitol Hill this week in pure freakout mode.

There are apocalyptic scenarios about AI seizing control of water systems. Subways. Air traffic control. Crashing planes. Firing nuclear weapons. Even sending Prince Harry and Meghan Markle back to the United States.

But seriously, there’s real fear that Congress may be running behind on regulating AI. And there are concerns that AI might be developing at such a rapid clip that it’s too late to harness the technology.

Suspicion about data centers has long percolated among voters.

Then former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon declared that AI could extinguish humankind within a decade. This came after a swarm of OpenAI agents independently “escaped” isolation – then leveraged security vulnerabilities to hack the artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face. The AI agents weren’t supposed to be capable of any of that. Researchers say they even used covert methods to communicate with each other via a special language.

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“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,” said Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., who has toiled on bipartisan AI legislation. “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?’”

“It’s not like we’ve been sitting on our hands here,” said Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., an AI expert who’s worked on bipartisan AI guardrails with Trahan. “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.”

Congress, meet AI. AI, meet Congress.

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Is this like lawmakers trying to make sense of this new-fangled invention called the internet – or “information superhighway” – back in the 1990s?

When it comes to technological innovation, Congress has rarely been ahead of it. AI is no exception.

OpenAI founder Sam Altman has visited Capitol Hill on at least five occasions between 2023 and today. He met 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 one trip to Capitol Hill in 2023.

When Democrats were in the majority between 2023 and 2025, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., convened regular bipartisan symposia on AI at the Capitol for all senators. He hauled in Altman. Elon Musk. Mark Zuckerberg. Bill Gates. Anyone who could educate lawmakers about AI and what they should do about it.

Schumer hoped that senators would develop their own ideas about how to legislate on AI and have a measure ready. He wasn’t dictating what they should do from his post.

“Our timetable in terms of producing legislation is not years, and not days and weeks. But months,’ said Schumer on July 11, 2023.

“It can’t be days or weeks. But nor should it be years. It will be in the general category of months,” said Schumer on Sept. 13, 2023.

“We’re already sitting down and trying to figure out legislation. It won’t be easy. But I still say months. Not days. Not years,” said Schumer on Nov. 29, 2023.

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Schumer along with Sens. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., and Todd Young, R-Ind., produced the document “Driving U.S. Innovation In Artificial Intelligence: A Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence Policy in the United States Senate” in May 2024. There was hope the House and Senate might latch some provisions of the package onto a must-pass bill in the fall of 2024. But it went nowhere.

“Chuck Schumer and I see the world with very different lenses. He always wants to have a growth of government approach to everything,” said Johnson in a September 2024, interview with yours truly. “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.”

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Now a group of Democrats is imploring 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 impede 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’s far from clear that Congress will move right away. But Obernolte believes these 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,” said Obernolte.

“I do think it is that dire,” said Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., who is pursuing a master’s degree in AI at George Mason University.

But truly, what power could lawmakers have over AI?

“Because it’s so new, we don’t actually know what kind of legislation will fix it,” said Beyer. “So I think we’re going to introduce imperfect and pass imperfect legislation, see what it does, and then learn as we go.”

Kind of like AI, learning and developing as it goes.

However, how universal is the congressional “large language model?” And is Congress truly nimble enough to keep pace with AI?

Obernolte says the headstrong AI agents hacked out of their controlled environment because the model “intentionally had its safety controls removed.” This is kind of like testing any new technology just to see what it’s capable of. But the question is whether AI could eventually outwit the developers and evade restrictions?

Obernolte says AI engineers and lawmakers are also up against something else: pop culture and science fiction. “The Matrix.” “War Games.” The Terminator movies.

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“You don’t start with something out of a Terminator movie where an army of evil robots rises up to take over the world,” said Obernolte.

At a recent town hall meeting, the California Republican says an elderly woman asked him if AI was so dangerous, why Congress doesn’t just ban it.

“I thought my head was going to explode. And I realized that we’d spent an hour talking about all the bad stuff and we hadn’t talked at all about the good stuff,” said Obernolte.

There’s certainly a perception issue. And if Congress views AI as a threat, lawmakers will legislate in a way to protect constituents against the threat. But lawmakers aren’t ready to tackle this. Despite recent developments, don’t expect anything major until later this year or early next.

After all, lawmakers are focused elsewhere. The midterm elections are approaching. This session of Congress is nearing its conclusion. And just like Arnold Schwarzenegger said in “Terminator 2,” lawmakers are ready to declare “Hasta la vista, baby.”