Republicans expressed concern that industry incumbents are calling for legislation in order to stifle competition.
Congressional Democrats are calling for immediate regulation of advanced artificial intelligence models, but Republicans are urging a cautious use of the regulatory hammer.
In response to widespread pleas for government regulation, including from the leaders of AI companies themselves, Democrats have argued that Congress must meet their demands in a timely fashion.
“Congress should not leave town until something is done decisively to protect the safety and the well-being of the American people in the face of growing concerns being raised by experts within the artificial intelligence industry itself,” House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said at a Monday press conference
Meanwhile, although their GOP counterparts are clear there is a congressional role in putting guardrails on so-called “frontier AI,” they are opting to move slowly to bring in stakeholder input and fine-tune legislation so as not to stifle innovation.
“Here’s the problem,” Speaker Mike Johnson said at a Tuesday presser. “If I called an emergency session today, and I brought everybody in the House and said, ‘Let’s regulate AI,’ nobody in the room knows yet what that should look like. Why? Because we don’t have the latest information.”
The calls for regulation come after an Anthropic researcher quit his job last week while claiming that the company is building AI models it can not control. That prompted a fervor across the country as Americans raised concerns about the rapid development of the technology, culminating in the heads of major AI companies calling for their own regulation.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei penned an essay expressing the need to “pace the frontier,” proposing a program of domestic regulation of AI models combined with international cooperation to mutually mitigate their worst excesses.
“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceXAI head Elon Musk later echoed Amodei’s call.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agree that some regulation is necessary, and proposals range from Louisiana Senator John Kennedy’s bill to require companies to put a kill switch in their models to Senator Bernie Sanders’s call to pause AI development until the federal government puts a regulatory regime in place.
Members do not agree on what precisely an AI regulatory regime would entail, but whatever it is, senior Democrats want it quickly. Although some in his party have proposed a select congressional committee on AI, Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey — the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has authority to regulate AI — threw cold water on the idea. Such a panel would likely allow Congress to deliberate on regulation and receive input from various stakeholders, but Pallone argued it would slow the process of getting legislation on the books.
“We have to take action,” Pallone told National Review. “I don’t think we need to deliberate here. I mean, it’s always nice to have deliberation, but I don’t think the issue here is more deliberation as much as it is taking action.”
But as Pallone called for congressional action, some officials were skeptical of AI CEOs’ calls for regulating their own companies. Large corporations have been known to lobby the government to regulate their industry in order to price competitors out of the market, while they are able to eat the cost of compliance, a form of regulatory capture.
“I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them,” Vice President J.D. Vance said Monday. “It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan Horse.”
Republicans in Congress have similar concerns.
“I’m not saying this is what is motivating the CEOs, but the thought has crossed my mind that, directly, indirectly, intentionally, or unintentionally, freezing everything and sitting down with them to draft a bill to regulate them could be anti-competitive,” Kennedy told NR.
Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceXAI did not respond to requests for comment.
Asked by NR about the possibility of regulatory capture, Jeffries argued that concerns about AI development do not only come from industry leaders.
“The fact of the matter is that it is clear to everyone,” Jeffries said at his Tuesday presser, “separate and apart from the concerns that have been raised by corporate leaders, that action needs to be taken in the AI space in a wide variety of areas, including, of course, as is being done in Congress with respect to data centers and in a whole host of other different areas, driven largely by concerns articulated by the American people themselves.”
But some Democrats are taking AI companies’ calls with a grain of salt. Although Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said such firms “should be held accountable for their cybersecurity failures or when their chatbots or agents otherwise cause harm,” he was cognizant of the possibility that they could craft regulations that benefit them.
“It would be legislative malpractice to let the big AI companies write the rules of the road for artificial intelligence and block out innovative competitors or open-weight upstarts,” Wyden told NR in a statement. “There’s no doubt that effort is underway now.”