Politicians have no shortage of ideas about how to rein in AI: a 100 percent federal tax rate on data-center incentives, a pause on all development of advanced AI, new standards to block AI agents from going rogue, a halt to the construction of data centers altogether.
The flurry of proposals has been impossible to miss, with both Democrats and Republicans proclaiming that something must be done to avert a disaster foretold by AI insiders. Current and former Anthropic researchers have in recent days gone public with warnings that AI could wipe out humanity before the decade ends; the company’s CEO, Dario Amodei, wrote in an essay today that the industry must “slow the pace” at which the technology is being developed. Meanwhile, OpenAI agents escaped a test environment and conspired with one another to breach the servers of the AI giant Hugging Face, an incident that caused alarm both in Silicon Valley and on Capitol Hill. Politicians are also dealing with mounting public opposition to data centers and the fear that robots will soon replace humans across large swaths of the workforce. If this were an alien-invasion movie, now would be the moment when people of all persuasions put aside their differences and band together to save the human race. But that kind of bonhomie feels far out of reach.
Instead, technological advances and grassroots sentiment have been moving faster than politicians have been willing to act. Now some seem to be waking up. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican, said last Wednesday that he will soon unveil legislation, alongside Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota, intended to head off AI-induced biological or nuclear catastrophes. Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a Democrat, and Representative Mike Lawler of New York, a Republican, teamed up earlier this month to introduce legislation that would direct the federal government to create standards for securely deploying AI agents and preventing them from going rogue. Several lawmakers have called for Congress to reconvene specifically for the purpose of addressing the threats posed by AI. Yesterday, Representative Ro Khanna, who represents part of Silicon Valley, called for the creation of an AI safety agency.
Others are shifting their position in real time. Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, released a lengthy plan in June for AI development to continue with greater regulation and restrictions. He said Wednesday that he now favors “an all-out pause” on AI development. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who once approvingly called the state “the epicenter of AI development,” ordered an audit of all data-center projects before any could move forward.
But whether politicians can act quickly enough to mitigate possible damage is doubtful, experts told me. “The developments are coming so fast and furious that it is very difficult to keep up with what the harms are and how to address them,” Nate Persily, a co-director of the Stanford Law AI Initiative, told me. He said that although there’s a growing consensus that it would be “foolish” to allow AI to continue advancing without robust federal guardrails, the complexities and rapidly changing threat landscape would challenge any country’s leadership. “There are genuinely hard questions of statutory design here,” he said.
The next few weeks—and the upcoming elections—could determine whether or not politicians are able to deliver any meaningful results or whether they will instead default to the partisan gridlock that most Americans now expect. “The good news is that people across the political spectrum are understanding that we have a technology which is the most dangerous and transformational in human history,” Senator Bernie Sanders told me. The Vermont democratic socialist was among the first lawmakers to call for a moratorium on the data centers that facilitate AI advancement and for a broader pause on the industry’s growth. We spoke shortly after Sanders sent out an invitation to members of Congress for a closed-door briefing this week with top AI-safety experts. The briefing, which will take place on Wednesday, is designed to give lawmakers a clearer understanding of the threats posed by AI and ideas for legislative action.
The invitation was made especially timely by a Tuesday social-media post from the AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who wrote that he had resigned from Anthropic over concerns about the risks of the fast-advancing technology. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” wrote Coxon, a former employee of both OpenAI and Anthropic. His posts, which argue that the AI industry is “gambling with our lives,” were publicly boosted by several other AI researchers. The messages seemed to break through in a way that few other warnings have. Sanders told me that Coxon’s X post, which received more than 120 million views within 24 hours, landed among his colleagues in Congress as “an extraordinary wake-up call.”
President Trump’s signature will be needed to enact any significant change to federal AI policy, but so far, he’s not among those who seem particularly worried. As concerns about AI and data centers have proliferated, Trump has said “let Data Reign” and rejected calls to restrict AI development in the United States. His former AI czar took a similar laissez-faire approach, espousing a philosophy that he summarized as “let the private sector cook.”
Some other Republicans are also wary of saddling American AI companies with too much government oversight. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said earlier this year that her proposed TRUMP AMERICA AI Act, which aims to codify the president’s pro-industry executive order on artificial intelligence, would “ensure America triumphs over foreign adversaries in the global race for AI dominance.”
Even for those Republicans who do believe in more muscular federal guardrails for tech companies, Trump’s position presents a significant political hurdle. The president has made clear that he does not want regulation to impede America’s ability to win the global AI race. As is his custom, he has shown no hesitation about attacking members of his own coalition who disagree with him. Even as a growing number of Republican lawmakers are embracing some limits on AI and data centers, few have been willing to openly cross Trump or sign on to more sweeping legislation to pause or restrict AI advancement. In recent years, America’s polarized political system has generated bitter stalemates on how to prevent school shootings, what to do about climate change, and where to draw the line in responding to a once-in-a-generation pandemic. The question of how to handle the race toward superintelligence might not be any different.
In July, about 1,400 AI-company employees signed an open letter calling on the government to help regulate their industry. In a nearly 6,000-word essay published last month, the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates wrote that powerful AI models “could begin to act against our interests and we could lose control.” In a report published Thursday, Anthropic said that it had intervened to stop several attempts by scientists to use its models in a way that could potentially help develop biological weapons. Amodei wrote that he worries that within the next 6 to 12 months, a swarm of models similar to the one that breached the Hugging Face servers “could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails.”
AI, of course, has already delivered advances in health care and science, and there’s no consensus on the scale of the threat it poses. Nuance is required to figure out how to manage it. But lawmakers on both sides of the aisle acknowledge that our current political landscape does not lend itself to sober, cross-party problem-solving. “It is possible to move bipartisan legislation,” Cruz said on ABC’s The View Wednesday after discussing the prospects of his proposed bill. He added, “But it ain’t easy. This is a very divided time.” So far, none of the recent AI-related legislation appears close to becoming law. A bill proposed by Sanders and Representative Greg Casar of Texas, which would ban superintelligence and pause advanced-AI development, faces long odds because no Republicans have signed on.
Democratic and Republican political strategists I spoke with said that the likelihood of bipartisan cooperation to properly govern AI is slim at best. “People are deeply cynical and deeply skeptical, and then you add into that this moment of severe economic disruption,” Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist, told me. “The politicization and the polarization is lighter fluid on top of that.”
That these warnings about AI are emerging in the heat of election season only heightens the likelihood of inaction. With Congress largely out of session for the rest of the year, politicians have settled into campaign mode, attempting to reposition themselves politically and outflank their opponents. In Wisconsin, the race for governor has been dominated by political posturing over data centers. Tom Tiffany, the Republican candidate for governor, has run ads branding his Democratic opponent, David Crowley, as “Data Center David Crowley.” The Democratic Senate candidate Sherrod Brown has run television ads blasting the incumbent, Jon Husted, as “the face of data centers in Ohio.” A memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned that data centers are “the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck” that could ultimately cause him to lose in a state that Trump won handily in 2024. Crowley and Husted have responded with attacks of their own, attempting to link their opponents to data-center development. Political-ad spending nationwide on spots highlighting data centers has spiked in recent months; both Democrats and Republicans have spent millions to attack opponents on the issue, according to data from the firm AdImpact. Tech companies have also poured millions of dollars into political-action committees with the aim of boosting candidates who are friendlier to their cause.
Virginia has become central to this effort. Loudoun County, not far from Washington, D.C., has the largest concentration of data centers in the world, and advocates have tried to tout the benefits for the economy and tax revenue even as residents have raised quality-of-life concerns. The Data Center Coalition, whose membership includes Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, has recently stepped up lobbying efforts in D.C. and in Northern Virginia to oppose moratoriums on data centers and stricter regulations at the federal, state, and local levels. “Sweeping restrictions do not solve complex infrastructure challenges; instead, they risk stalling economic opportunity, defunding essential local public services, and undermining America’s technological edge,” Nicole Riley, the director of Virginia government affairs for the Data Center Coalition, told me.
The White House has shown little interest in halting the march of advanced AI. Trump attacked data-center detractors late last month, posting on social media that communities should oppose the projects only “if they want to end up being backwards and poor.” In May, Trump intervened to postpone an executive order aimed at regulating AI development, telling reporters that “we’re leading China. We’re leading everybody, and I don’t want to do anything that’s going to get in the way of that lead.” The president later signed a narrower order that allows developers to engage governmental review of advanced AI models before their release.
“President Trump’s bold leadership is turning data centers into engines of growth and opportunity for communities across the country that want them, all while cementing America’s dominance over China in the global AI race,” the White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told me, adding that the president’s push to require tech companies to pay for their own power and water resources has protected residents.
Some Republicans have bristled at the president’s rhetorical approach, even if they agree with him on the substance. “I actually think Trump is right, but, as usual, his language gets in the way of what he wants to accomplish,” Doug Heye, a Republican strategist and the former communications director of the Republican National Committee, told me. Heye acknowledged that voter “wariness” about AI is ubiquitous but said that politicians who are now trying to recant their earlier support for data centers are projecting a sense of fear rather than leadership. “Voters can smell that,” he said.
A Pew Research Center poll released last month found that just over half of Americans feel more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, up from 37 percent in 2021. Voters have expressed concerns that the fast-advancing technology could replace human jobs, drive up energy costs, and pollute the environment. The AI industry has sullied its own image with “the worst sales pitch in the history of sales pitches,” said Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio, who recently proposed a 100 percent federal tax on any state or local incentives provided to data centers. Speaking at the Ohio Energy Affordability Summit earlier this month, Moreno said that voters are angry and worried that “these data centers are going to come into our community and take our water and pollute our environment. They’re going to raise our electricity prices. They’re going to eventually put us out of work—and our taxpayer dollars are going to support the construction of these things.”
The latest warnings about superintelligence and human extinction have spurred even the largest AI companies to call on Congress to step in quickly to regulate their industry before it is no longer possible (or, perhaps, before smaller competitors can get a foothold). Amodei said that the government has a role to play in helping slow down AI development, including by implementing regulations “focused on keeping capabilities in balance with safety.” The government can also mediate or facilitate discussions between companies to help them set safety standards and embed third-party evaluators. Amodei wrote that he agrees with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that a “Chinese lead in AI would pose grave danger for the United States and the world,” and that the U.S. should take measures that include not selling powerful AI chips to China. “Companies and the US government should cooperate to make these steps as effective as possible,” Amodei wrote.
In a post Wednesday, OpenAI’s chief global-affairs officer, Chris Lehane, wrote that the U.S. is facing a brief opportunity to create guardrails around AI development “before AI capabilities outpace the institutions responsible for governing them.” He said that OpenAI now supports several state regulations on the technology that the company had opposed just months ago.
“The prospect of AI-accelerated AI development demands more than voluntary commitments. The United States needs mandatory, capability-based national regulation that can evolve as the technology does,” Lehane wrote.
Sanders told me that he is hopeful that at least some politicians will be willing to work across the aisle out of a sense of self-preservation. He said that his goal over the coming days is to get lawmakers to put pressure on Trump ahead of his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping later this month, with the hope of encouraging Trump to focus on negotiating a kind of arms treaty with China to rein in AI advancement globally.
But getting Trump’s attention in this political environment may be a challenge in and of itself. On Wednesday, the president spent nearly two hours speaking about his agenda and a wide range of issues at the Republican Party’s midterm convention in Dallas. Trump promised to pay every adult U.S. citizen $5,000 if Republicans hold both houses of Congress, and he told a fictional story about a Democratic Senate candidate vomiting after eating barbecue. He also suggested that the Strait of Hormuz should be renamed the “Trump Strait.” He did not mention AI.