Trump has no concerns over AI’s existential risks and Congress is sleepwalking into a crisis
President Donald Trump downplayed concerns about the catastrophic risks of artificial intelligence raised this week by some AI researchers, saying late Thursday he was focused instead on the U.S. losing its edge in the tech arms race.
Asked whether he has concerns about existential risks posed by AI, 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,” Trump told reporters late Thursday as he left Dallas. “We are leading China right now by a pretty good period.” [Continue reading…]
Members of Congress are confronting a grim reality: They are ill-equipped to rein in advanced artificial intelligence that one expert warns could “kill us all” by the end of the decade.
A viral social media post this week from ex-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon cautioned that AI companies are “gambling with our lives” as they race to develop superintelligent models — prompting alarm from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and new calls to action.
In conversations with POLITICO throughout the day Wednesday, more than a dozen lawmakers and aides from both parties said they were hopeful Congress would start taking the issue seriously. By Wednesday evening, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, was pledging to “work with Congress” to implement “mandatory, capability-based national AI safety regulation.”
But many also conceded that Congress is currently sleepwalking into a crisis, far from ready to tackle the stakes of the moment in light of both philosophical differences and intractable partisan politicking.
“I think we’re finally hitting a tipping point,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), who co-chairs the House AI Caucus, said in an interview. “I’m just so grateful that the whole world is finally paying attention … and now the question is, what do we do?”
Mounting worries inside the tech industry about a looming AI apocalypse are beginning to resonate with more members of Congress. Building on the panic seven weeks ago when hundreds of OpenAI-generated “agents” went rogue and hacked another AI platform, Hugging Face, lawmakers Wednesday called for radical action in the immediate aftermath of Coxon’s X posts late Tuesday night.
“There’s broad consensus — and in speaking with the AI companies directly, they want a regulatory framework,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), a vulnerable moderate incumbent who has introduced bipartisan AI safety legislation, said Wednesday.
He called it “one of the biggest issues that Congress has to tackle over the next two years.”
It’s far from certain this desire to make progress on the issue will translate into meaningful legislative activity — and certainly not before the end of the year, with some lawmakers questioning whether their colleagues take the matter seriously or fully understand how the technology even works.
Democratic Rep. Sam Liccardo of California, who leads AI policy for the centrist New Democrat Coalition, said in an interview his team recently struggled to convince other members to attend a series of events at the Library of Congress that featured OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. [Continue reading…]