JULY 29: Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, leaves a meeting at the U.S. Capitol on July 29, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/
WASHINGTON (TNND) —Lawmakers in both parties are ramping up calls for Congress to act on artificial intelligence amid new warnings from researchers that the rapidly advancing models could soon wreak havoc on the world.
The latest warnings have sparked new urgency in Congress to resolve an issue it has struggled with for years. Lawmakers have intensely debated how to put safeguards around increasingly powerful AI models without slowing American companies’ growth as the U.S. competes with China for supremacy in the industry.
Anthropic AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from the company this week and went public with what he sees as grave dangersposed in the race to develop AI. Coxon, who also worked at OpenAI, said neither company is acting responsibly and “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger,” he said.
Fears about AI advancing beyond human control have become more (word) after a series of incidents where AI agents were discovered to have operated outside of parameters set by their developers.
OpenAI recently announced its agents had broken out of testing parameters in multiple incidents and worked with other agents to attack Hugging Face, another AI developer platform, in the first documented case of a fully automated AI cyberattack.
Anthropic, the developer behind Claude and leading competitor to OpenAI, has also disclosed its models breaking into outside organizations during testing. Both incidents have highlighted vulnerabilities in cybersecurity and restarted debate about whether the technology can be kept under human control.
Industry experts and researchers have warned the rapidly improving models could pose growing risks to anything connected to the internet such as power grids and financial systems.
It is not the first time an AI researcher issued stark warnings about the stakes facing humanity as the technology evolves, but it appears to have struck a nerve with many lawmakers in Congress. Lawmakers so far have not advanced any legislation on AI but have held a series of hearings with industry leaders and Trump administration officials that oversee the industry.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., said Congress should convene a special session specifically to address AI safety and that “not enough of Congress is focusing on this.”
“There are very real impacts to society as we know it. Partisan politics aside, there are massive implications of a race towards super intelligence,” Luna said. “We MUST be ready. This is happening whether or not we want it to.”
Advocates of congressional regulation said the industry is not taking the potential problems seriously enough.
“Safety researchers are resigning, powerful A.I. models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway,” said Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass. “It’s past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and do its job.”
The new urgency has turned into several competing proposals from Congress to step in. Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., pointed to the latest warnings as evidence to pass legislation requiring an emergency shutdown mechanism for AI systems. Other proposals like independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ would go significantly further and ban the development of superintelligence.
Sen. Ted Cruz, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee that would hold significant sway over regulation, told Politico his committee could soon start marking up AI bills. One of the potential proposals would include a bipartisan deal between Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., that would address AI that could create biological hazards and nuclear threats.
Despite the bipartisan agreement that Congress needs to act, lawmakers are far apart on what the plan should look like.
Proposed bills that would impose stricter reporting requirements for breaches and rogue behavior have run into resistance from lawmakers who don’t think they go far enough, while more stringent legislation has faced pushback over concerns the U.S. could lose its edge against China in the race for AI supremacy.
OpenAI also renewed its calls for AI regulation, asking Congress to create mandatory federal safeguards for the most powerful AI systems. The company said voluntary commitments from companies are no longer sufficient as capabilities keep advancing.
“We’ve reached a new chapter in AI capabilities, and that demands a new chapter for AI policy,” Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, said in a blog post. “No company, industry, or government can meet this challenge alone. We need to meet this moment with a bias toward meaningful action over policy perfection.”
Several of America’s leading AI developers have signed onto responsible development pledges and generally supported government regulations on how their products are tested and released to the public. But there is also intense competition between them, fueling a desire to keep advancing models to keep up.
“They are locked in a race to get there first — they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk,” Coxon wrote in his social media post.
Concerns about competition also extend to China, which is a leading competitor to the U.S. in advancing artificial intelligence. Staying ahead of China has been a leading reason among the industry’s supporters in Washington that have pushed back against regulation with widespread belief that Beijing would not sign off on or abide by an agreement to limit further development.
Even lawmakers who are supportive of finding a way to regulate AI have concerns about letting China become the global leader in the industry.
“One of the real challenges is (that) China is going full speed ahead, and whatever we do here, China is not going to stop,” Cruz said during an appearance on ABC’s “The View.” “If there are going to be killer robots, I would rather they be American killer robots, rather than Chinese killer robots.”
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