Toluse Olorunnipa writes:

Politicians have no shortage of ideas about how to rein in AI: a 100 percent federal tax rate on data-center incentives, a pause on all development of advanced AI, new standards to block AI agents from going rogue, a halt to the construction of data centers altogether.

The flurry of proposals has been impossible to miss, with both Democrats and Republicans proclaiming that something must be done to avert a disaster foretold by AI insiders. Current and former Anthropic researchers have in recent days gone public with warnings that AI could wipe out humanity before the decade ends; the company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, wrote in an essay today that the industry must “slow the pace” at which the technology is being developed. Meanwhile, OpenAI agents escaped a test environment and conspired with one another to breach the servers of the AI giant Hugging Face, an incident that caused alarm both in Silicon Valley and on Capitol Hill. Politicians are also dealing with mounting public opposition to data centers and the fear that robots will soon replace humans across large swaths of the workforce. If this were an alien-invasion movie, now would be the moment when people of all persuasions put aside their differences and band together to save the human race. But that kind of bonhomie feels far out of reach.

Instead, technological advances and grassroots sentiment have been moving faster than politicians have been willing to act. Now some seem to be waking up. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican, said last Wednesday that he will soon unveil legislation, alongside Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota, intended to head off AI-induced biological or nuclear catastrophes. Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a Democrat, and Representative Mike Lawler of New York, a Republican, teamed up earlier this month to introduce legislation that would direct the federal government to create standards for securely deploying AI agents and preventing them from going rogue. Several lawmakers have called for Congress to reconvene specifically for the purpose of addressing the threats posed by AI. Yesterday, Representative Ro Khanna, who represents part of Silicon Valley, called for the creation of an AI safety agency.

Others are shifting their position in real time. Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, released a lengthy plan in June for AI development to continue with greater regulation and restrictions. He said Wednesday that he now favors “an all-out pause” on AI development. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who once approvingly called the state “the epicenter of AI development,” ordered an audit of all data-center projects before any could move forward.

But whether politicians can act quickly enough to mitigate possible damage is doubtful, experts told me. “The developments are coming so fast and furious that it is very difficult to keep up with what the harms are and how to address them,” Nate Persily, a co-director of the Stanford Law AI Initiative, told me. He said that although there’s a growing consensus that it would be “foolish” to allow AI to continue advancing without robust federal guardrails, the complexities and rapidly changing threat landscape would challenge any country’s leadership. “There are genuinely hard questions of statutory design here,” he said.

The next few weeks—and the upcoming elections—could determine whether or not politicians are able to deliver any meaningful results or whether they will instead default to the partisan gridlock that most Americans now expect. “The good news is that people across the political spectrum are understanding that we have a technology which is the most dangerous and transformational in human history,” Senator Bernie Sanders told me. The Vermont democratic socialist was among the first lawmakers to call for a moratorium on the data centers that facilitate AI advancement and for a broader pause on the industry’s growth. We spoke shortly after Sanders sent out an invitation to members of Congress for a closed-door briefing this week with top AI-safety experts. The briefing, which will take place on Wednesday, is designed to give lawmakers a clearer understanding of the threats posed by AI and ideas for legislative action. [Continue reading…]