Welcome to Washington: AI Regulation Poised To Dominate the New Congress

When the next Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027 — whether it be under Democratic or Republican majorities — one of the most important issues with which lawmakers will have to grapple is the regulation of new artificial intelligence technologies. Some — Republicans included — are calling for action as quickly as possible as the AI industry has become an especially salient political issue. A sign of how quickly the AI regulation issue has forced its way into the midterms is the increasing popularity of moratoriums on the construction of data centers. Republicans and Democrats alike are running ads accusing one another of being bigger data center lovers than their opponents. The Republican nominee for governor of Wisconsin has been calling his Democratic opponent, David Crowley, “Data Center David.”While moratoriums — imposed either nationally or at the state and local levels — are largely a campaign issue that has not broken through to Capitol Hill, a warning last weekend from Athropic’s Dario Amodei clearly shook lawmakers. Mr. Amodei warned that the development of AI agents must be slowed immediately, for fear that the same agents could take over the entire internet. “AI has been advancing drastically faster, driven primarily by AI’s growing ability to build the next generation of AI,” Mr. Amodei wrote in a lengthy essay. “Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all.”Within days, one of Congress’s most conservative Republicans was ready to take action. Senator John Kennedy, who admits to having many libertarian sensibilities, tried to pass a standalone bill to require AI labs to develop their own “kill switches” — mechanisms companies can use to shut down AI agents at a moment’s notice should an issue arise.“I’m not putting the government in charge of the kill switch. I’m just saying that if you have an AI model, you’ve got to have a kill switch,” Mr. Kennedy told reporters of his legislation. He argued that AI regulation is necessary not only because of security concerns, but because Americans broadly do not trust the industry itself. Americans lack confidence because “they think they’re being lied to and taken advantage of. I’m not saying they’re right to feel that way, but these are feelings,” Mr. Kennedy told reporters. President Trump himself has pushed back against the idea of regulating AI in any way. On Truth Social, Mr. Trump wrote that the only safety mechanism needed is to have a “High IQ” president. Mr. Trump’s own administration has made clear that there must be some level of collaboration between American and Chinese officials, unlike other past arms races. Speaking to reporters at New York City on Sunday night, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he had agreed with China’s vice premier, He Lifeng, to talk about a notification system between the two countries in case something were to go wrong.“The notification [is] for whether there are incidents [or] whether there has been something that rises up to the national security level from AI. We think, just like any cross-border activity, that moving from opaque to more transparency between the number one and the number two AI powers in the world is very important,” Mr. Bessent told reporters. Experts have warned lawmakers that there must be much more than just consensual collaboration. The “godfather of AI” — Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton — warned reporters that the world has “not much more than a year,” to regulate the technology. He made the comments after a private meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill. “If you look at predictions for when we’ll get superintelligence … it used to be maybe 30 years, maybe 50 years, then it came down to maybe ten years, maybe 20 years. Now … a lot of the researchers are saying only a few years,” Mr. Hinton said this week. The urgency of regulating the technology may be one of the few bipartisan issues come next year, should Democrats take control of either the House or Senate, or both. House Democrats are already pushing a Republican-authored bill, the Frontier Act, which would create new oversight mechanisms and regulations for AI technologies. Congressman Ted Lieu, the House’s number four member who is poised to become caucus chairman if his party wins a majority, says the necessary committee must take up that bipartisan bill as quickly as possible.

Welcome to Washington: AI Regulation Poised To Dominate the New Congress

Welcome to Washington: AI Regulation Poised To Dominate the New Congress

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