House Speaker Mike Johnson addressed the growing number of AI leaders who are calling for a global slow down in the development of artificial intelligence models amid the uncertain growth of technology.
During CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Johnson shared his take after host Jake Tapper mentioned that several top AI leaders, like Anthropic CEO <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/anthropic-ceo-urges-ai-companies-slow-model-development_n_6aa56897e4b0298845cc9294″ rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Dario Amodei and Open AI CEO Sam Altman, united over the weekend to warn that AI models are advancing too fast.
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They are “begging for Congress and the president to step in and provide some guard rails,” Tapper said.
“Frankly, they seem terrified,” Tapper added. “Do you think AI as it is right now poses an existential threat, and are you going to heed their request?”
According to Johnson, the government is heeding their request but, “we are also calling upon [the AI heads] to do responsible things.”
He said that after being sworn in as House speaker in 2025, he immediately put together a bipartisan AI task force in the House that would “deliberate and research what the best way there is to go to put guard rails, some safety in place to make sure that AI doesn’t get out of control.”
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He added that at the same time, “there is an obvious corporate responsibility that the people who are creating these models have to ensure that their products are safe.”
Johnson pointed to President Donald Trump’s White House AI and crypto czar, David Sacks’ Saturday X post that called out Amodei and other AI leaders.
In the post, Sacks argued that lawmakers cannot see what AI leaders are doing in their labs, and “the easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it.”
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Summing up Sacks’ post, Johnson told Tapper that Sacks addressed “the guys that are calling for this [slow down] are the ones that are pushing the frontier … they need to take personal responsibility first, and we need to get them all in a room at the same time and agree on what the guard rails are.”
Johnson said it’s fine if AI leaders want to slow things down, “but we also at the same time have to resist Congress jumping in and imposing some sort of emergency moratorium … It’s got to be done right, safely, wisely.”
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He then proposed all of AI leaders should “come together in a meeting with us and sit down and figure out what the right balance is.”
“We cannot put a moratorium on this because China will overlap us,” he said. “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. So, we’ve got to have balance.”
Watch Johnson’s appearance on “State of the Union” below. Skip to the 0:31 mark to hear his comments about artificial intelligence.
