Baba UmarWashington DC — Members of the US Congress, typically split along party lines, were preparing for the November midterm elections.
But several key recent developments across the technology sector now require their consensus — how to prevent technology from operating autonomously without human oversight.
It began with "rogue" artificial intelligence (AI) agents escaping containment.
Then an AI researcher warned that leading firms are "gambling with our lives" by racing towards self-improving superintelligence.
Days after former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon issued a "human extinction" warning, leading technology executives — including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei — sought assistance from the US government to help deliberately slow and monitor the rapid advancement of frontier AI models.
In an essay on Monday, Anthropic CEO made another appeal to pace AI development, warning of "catastrophic damage."
Referring to the incident involving OpenAI and Hugging Face, Amodei warned: "Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it is my worry that in six to 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."
Among members of the Congress, there is general agreement that the technology is advancing rapidly and requires some form of oversight.
But sharp divisions remain over how fast to act, how strict regulations should be, whether industry or government should lead, and whether other countries, particularly China, will slow down their AI model development.
'We will lose the race to China'
According to the Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, artificial intelligence developers, rather than Congress, should ensure the safety of AI systems. Johnson has rejected any national moratorium, citing competition with China as a rationale to avoid congressional regulation.
"We cannot put a moratorium on this because China will overlap us, and that’s the challenge," Johnson told CNN on Sunday. "If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American."
Some Republicans, such as outgoing Senator John Cornyn have questioned whether Congress even has the expertise to regulate a rapidly changing technology and whether US adversaries — such as China — would follow the same rules.
Representative Byron Donalds has expressed skepticism that Congress can pass effective federal rules and suggested states should take the lead.
"One of the reasons that I didn’t think you could get a federal framework through Washington, DC, is because of the inability, especially in the Senate, to get any meaningful policy through that chamber," the Republican Congressman told Fox News.
Members of the US Senate returned to their offices on Capitol Hill on Monday, marking the first time both chambers have been in session since the August recess. The House members are set to leave Washington the week of September 21, two weeks ahead of schedule, while senators are due to remain until October 2.
On Friday, a group of Democrats led by Representative Sam Liccardo wrote to Speaker Johnson, demanding to stay in session until it passes meaningful AI safeguards.
Their letter, first accessed by Axios, pointed to recent disclosures involving rogue AI agents, biological misuse, cyber-attacks, foreign surveillance, and efforts by Chinese firms "to replicate" leading American AI systems.
"Reasonable minds may disagree about precisely how Congress should regulate this rapidly evolving technology. We cannot disagree about the imperative for Congress to act," the lawmakers wrote.
The letter highlighted several proposals, including legislation mandating transparency and the evaluation of frontier models, "kill switch" requirements, and a waiver of antitrust laws to enable critical industry-wide collaboration on safety and security.
"The House should return to Washington immediately and remain in session until Congress advances meaningful, bipartisan AI safeguards. To our children who will have read a post-apocalyptic history, 'Why Congress Slept' — likely written by agentic AI—our inaction will be inexplicable, and unforgivable," the letter urged.
Democrats are advancing the AI Kill Switch Act, requiring developers of advanced AI systems to maintain the technical capacity to throttle, suspend, or shut them down.
The act also authorises the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, in consultation with the Secretary of Commerce and the Director of National Intelligence, to order a slowdown or shutdown of an AI system that could cause catastrophic harm.
Meanwhile, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries told ABC News that Democrats would meet on Tuesday to discuss AI guardrails.
"We should take decisive action now so that we can slow down, as the CEOs have recently acknowledged, slow down the pace of development in order to protect the American people and ensure that AI is proceeding safely," he said.
Trump says AI alarm is a 'hoax'
But US President Donald Trump has rejected the idea of placing guardrails on AI, arguing in a Truth Social post on Monday that the only control needed is "a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!"
Trump stressed that his administration holds "tremendous criminal and regulatory power" over AI tech and data centre enterprises, alleging that critics are waging a "sick conspiracy" that only satisfies Chinese interests.
In another post, he dismissed the AI alarm as a "hoax".
"AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX, no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA — UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #1 — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #2 — and all of the other HOAXES and SCAMS that America was forced to endure," he claimed.
Addressing the issue, US Vice President JD Vance said that advanced technology brings concerns, telling reporters that the administration wants "to make sure that we actually regulate smartly and we're thoughtful about the risk here."
However, he characterised the tech firms appeal for government curbs as potentially disingenuous, adding: "You have so many frontier AI tech companies coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them, it feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse."
Meanwhile in the Congress, any measure passed to regulate artificial intelligence development faces slim chances of becoming law. President Trump has already suggested he would not sign a bill setting new rules for the growing sector.
