But when Husted requested a speedy passage of the Ratepayer Protection Act—a bill that would have required states to consider forcing companies that consume a lot of energy to pay for the related costs—Heinrich blocked the move. He said the legislation was inadequate because it relied on voluntary commitments from states and proposed his own bill as an alternative.
“The Ratepayer Protection Act might make a lot of politicians feel good, but it won’t do anything to actually force data centers to pay their fair share,” Heinrich said in a statement. “Democrats are ready for a real solution, and I think that’s exactly what Americans want to see, too.” Husted blamed Democrats for giving big tech companies “a free pass” while Americans’ electric bills continue to rise.
Democrats, and some Republicans, have proposed hundreds of AI-related bills as Americans become increasingly worried about the ways AI companies may disrupt the job market, raise their energy bills, and even wipe out humanity. Lawmakers’ pro-regulation rhetoric in Washington reached new heights this month after the resignation of former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon gained worldwide attention for posting on X that frontier AI labs were “gambling with our lives.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei responded with calls for an industry slowdown and government intervention to coordinate global safety standards.
“The mood right now, at least in Congress, is very reactive—and I don't mean that in a good way,” said Suresh Venkatasubramanian, director of Brown University’s Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign. “They're trying to push legislation that seems to address what appears to be a problem coming from the [public] narrative but that doesn't always necessarily lead to good policy overall.”
But even with a longer timeline, lawmakers may struggle to turn their rhetoric into action. Lawmakers will have to overcome deep differences in their views about how dangerous superintelligent AI systems are to the American people and which AI-related risks merit the most attention. Even if lawmakers coalesce around one AI problem, it may be hard for them to settle on the right mitigation strategy quickly enough to keep up with the pace of AI advancements. And if Democrats take over even one chamber after the midterms next month, legislative debates could end up being even more mired in partisan disputes. They would still have to negotiate with Trump, who has largely dismissed the most catastrophic risks of AI as conspiratorial and resisted calls for more regulation.
Certain lawmakers have sought to address some of the most extreme risks posed by general-purpose AI models, such as the possibility that these systems could eventually be used to create a new pathogen that sets off a global pandemic, carry out a cyberattack on critical infrastructure, or build biological or radiological weapons. Those worries took on a new sense of urgency in July when OpenAI announced that a group of AI agents went rogue during a cybersecurity test and hacked into a separate company, Hugging Face.
The idea for independent testing has support within the tech industry. Leading the Future, a PAC that has received money from OpenAI president Greg Brockman, has signaled support for the FRONTIER Act. Amodei, the Anthropic CEO, has said he plans to embed investigators from AI-monitoring nonprofit METR, which officially reviewed OpenAI’s Hugging Face incident, to verify the company’s safety practices.
Another issue that has already slowed down negotiations on Capitol Hill is the question of whether a federal AI bill should override state laws—a legislative approach embraced by many Republicans and the Trump White House.
So far, most lawmakers have stopped short of backing a proposal from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) to ban superintelligent artificial intelligence, which the lawmakers define as AI “that exceeds human cognitive performance.” Sanders and Casar also propose pausing the development of advanced AI models until the government sets up the Department of Artificial Intelligence to oversee their safety. Critics say passing that kind of law would only allow Chinese tech companies to make gains in the AI race—a more dangerous prospect in the end.
“It does no good at all if we have all kinds of [AI] rules in the United States or even in the free democracies of the world, and then these [chips] all get smuggled into China, into Russia, [and] into North Korea,” said Foster.
Still, even those bills face political challenges. Industry critics argue that restricting the exports of American tech only encourages China to invest in its own chips. The defense spending bill has been stalled in the Senate since Democrats blocked its advancement in July in protest of Trump’s handling of the Iranian war.
“Everybody's concerned about safety, but nobody knows what the concern should turn into legislatively.”
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