September 14, 2026, 20:05 GMT | Comment
A call from US artificial intelligence company CEOs this weekend to slow the pace of frontier model development has members of Congress demanding action. But lawmakers are not of one mind on how to proceed, and President Donald Trump is downplaying the need for new regulation, raising questions about the likelihood of responsive lawmaking in the near term.
A call from CEOs of US artificial intelligence companies this weekend to slow the pace of frontier model development has members of Congress demanding action. But lawmakers are not of one mind on how to proceed, and President Donald Trump is downplaying the need for new regulation, raising questions about the likelihood of responsive lawmaking in the near term.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay Saturday calling for "pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up." He called for embedding AI labs with third-party monitors, establishing a federal antitrust waiver to facilitate safety talks between companies, keeping advanced chips out of China, and negotiating pacing agreements with China and other adversarial nations.
AI's "self-improvement" abilities, combined with a recent incident in which autonomous
OpenAI agents broke out of a testing environment, compelled Amodei to speak up, he said (see
here). His essay also comes on the heels of viral resignation posts from a former Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, warning that people developing AI "earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and
SpaceX founder Elon Musk both quickly endorsed Amodei's call for pacing, with Altman specifically pledging in a post on X to welcome "independent evaluators with employee-like access." Posting on Sunday,
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also welcomed "ideas like 'embedded evaluators' and the broader efforts to develop the mechanisms to make this more than just talk."
Amodei endorsed regulation in his letter, calling it the "most effective method of pacing" all frontier AI companies. Altman was less definitive in a Sunday X post, saying "first we should do what we can ourselves."
As AI executives speak out, federal lawmakers are pushing for a range of legislative responses. For example, the Frontier Act, sponsored in the House of Representatives by Massachusetts Democrat Lori Trahan and California Republican Jay Obernolte, would set up a licensing regime for third-party evaluators, known as Independent Verification Organizations (see
here).
In an X post on Saturday, Trahan argued that mandatory third-party testing is preferable to company-level commitments, saying that "Bringing in independent evaluators is a real step. But a voluntary commitment can be dropped the second it gets inconvenient."
While the Frontier Act appears to be gaining support, AI policy observers in Washington are also anticipating legislation from Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, with support from Republican Senator Ted Cruz, chair of the Senate Commerce Committee (see
here).
Neil Chilson, head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, said Monday that he recently reviewed a draft of the Senate bill, which makes it "very clear that there's a duty on these companies to mitigate grave risks," and creates a path for the government to intervene.
But the Senate proposal has met some headwinds, including from Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, the ranking member of the chamber's Commerce Committee. Cantwell's team has provided feedback to Klobuchar's office that the federal government needs to be involved in testing advanced models, MLex understands.
In an X post on Thursday, Cantwell said the answer "is not a weak federal standard that becomes a backdoor for wiping out stronger state protections."
Klobuchar said in a statement to MLex on Monday that "we need to act now and not wait," and she is continuing to work on a bipartisan agreement. The proper oversight would include "requiring developers to work with government experts to verify and test models to make sure AI is safe," she continued.
Thune's office declined to comment, and Cruz's office did not reply to a comment request.
Meanwhile, party leaders are calling for urgent discussions about AI safety, if not specific legislative action. "We're going to meet as a caucus on Tuesday and a high priority will be artificial intelligence," House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Sunday on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
Also on the interview circuit this weekend, House Speaker Mike Johnson said that while guardrails can keep AI models in check, companies can also act on their own. There is "an obvious corporate responsibility that the people who are creating these models have to ensure that their products are safe," he told
CNN's Jake Tapper.
The AI companies need to "come together in a meeting with us and sit down and figure out what the right balance is," Johnson said. "We cannot put a moratorium on this because China will overlap us. And that's the challenge."
Trump also referenced competition with China on Monday as he downplayed the need for new regulation. Accusing Amodei of pretending to be a "perfect little angel," he said that the "only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!" (see
here).
The president continued posting into the afternoon, saying that AI "taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad" is a "HOAX."
Among other congressional headwinds, time is limited. Both the House and Senate plan to be out of session in October in the leadup to the November midterm elections.
California Democratic Representative Ro Khanna acknowledged the time constraints in a Friday post on X. "Speaker Mike Johnson has a moral and practical duty to keep Congress in session until we have taken meaningful action to regulate AI," he said.
So far, louder and louder industry warnings about AI risks appear to be enforcing factions in Washington, rather than driving consensus.
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