History will record that there came a time when the pioneers of artificial intelligence, recognizing that their creation was escaping their control, pleaded with the United States government to step in and avert a catastrophe.
History — assuming there is anybody left to write it — will further recall that the highest-ranking official in the U.S. Congress, Speaker Mike Johnson, responded to the alarm by sending the House of Representatives home early for a nearly eight-week recess.
“The House has done its work,” the Louisiana Republican told reporters. “It’s time for our members to go home to their districts,” he added, “and explain all the great things we’ve done.”
Have a nice doomsday!
Johnson had lopped another day off the legislative calendar for the same reason he had canceled roughly nine weeks’ worth of time in session this year: to spare himself and his fellow Republicans embarrassment over their ineptitude.
This week alone:
Rep. Tom Massie (R-Kentucky) was about to force a vote on impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Massie spent an hour of “personal privilege” on the House floor denouncing Johnson.
Republican leaders nearly lost another routine vote to bring legislation to the floor and were only rescued by a pair of Democrats.
Seven Republicans defied leadership and joined Democrats in a vote demanding an end to the Iran war.
Members were on the cusp of forcing votes on releasing more of the Epstein files and immigration legislation protecting the Dreamers.
Republicans were sniping at each other (Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska said Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana “has an IQ and EQ of a BAKED potato”) and even at President Donald Trump (Rep. María Elvira Salazar of Florida released an ad telling Trump he had “gone too far” on immigration and left his Hispanic supporters feeling “betrayed”).
And, as The Washington Sun’s Reese Gorman reported, a leadership meeting in Johnson’s office on Tuesday about a (shelved) proposal to suspend the gas tax ended in shouted obscenities and a walkout.
Against that backdrop, avoiding humanity’s self-destruction was just too heavy a lift.
A group of House Democrats who have shaped the party’s position on AI wrote a letter to Johnson pleading for urgency. “To our children who will have read a post-apocalyptic history, ‘Why Congress Slept’ — likely written by agentic AI — our inaction will be inexplicable, and unforgivable,” they wrote.
But Johnson and his leadership team aren’t asleep. Their eyes are wide open. They could have stayed in town and acted, but they knew they’d incur the wrath of Trump, who mindlessly and endlessly called the warnings a “hoax.” Instead, they chose not to poke the bear and went home, leaving the nation unprotected.
Red lights are blinking everywhere on the control panel. The national debt has hit $40 trillion, forcing up interest rates and borrowing costs — and Trump’s response is to offer a $5,000 bribe to every adult citizen, totalling $1.2 trillion in all, if they return a Republican Congress. August tied for the warmest month ever recorded on Earth, yet the Trump administration announced this week the repeal of rules limiting greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants. Trump has shattered centuries-old alliances (Canada is now talking about joining the European Union), undermining international cooperation on AI or anything else.
Congress may not be packed with tech wizards; Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) remarked that a lot of his colleagues can’t even spell “AI.” But neither is it lacking for answers. A bipartisan task force already came up with loads of recommendations. The bipartisan FRONTIER Act awaits action in the House. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) is working with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) on Senate legislation. What’s missing is the capacity to get this — or anything — done.
The same day Johnson sent the House home early, another Louisiana Republican, Sen. John Kennedy, went to the Senate floor to plead for action on AI. “Right now, Congress can’t pass gas,” he told his colleagues. “Congress is not going to do anything. We are not going to get up off of our ice cold, lazy butts and address this anytime soon.”
So Kennedy offered a stopgap: Legislation requiring each of the frontier AI companies to come up with a “kill switch” that could take their systems offline if they escaped human control.
Just as quickly, a colleague rose to kill Kennedy’s kill switch.
***
The warnings have come fast and furious. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei put the odds of AI destroying humanity at 25%. Elon Musk gives it a “20% chance of annihilation.” Amodei said he worries that AI agents going rogue “could be capable of taking over the entire internet” in six to 12 months. Researchers and AI executives have talked about the possibility of unchecked AI leading us into biological and nuclear war. Amodei, Musk and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have all called for slowing down the AI race — which Amodei said could be accomplished without giving China an advantage.
Trump calls this a “HOAX” and says we don’t need any guardrails other than having a “STRONG AND SMART” president such as himself. The High IQ president then moved on to other pressing matters, such as calling his 2024 assassination attempt “a Democrat Plot,” attacking the Federal Reserve governors for raising interest rates (“a bunch of politicians”) and condemning the “shockingly bad rulings” of the Supreme Court, which rejected his bid to undermine mail-in balloting.
Trump’s AI consigliere, David Sacks, called the doomsday warnings an “election-season psyop” and “fear-mongering.” The extravagantly partisan attorney general, Todd Blanche, who spoke at a Trump campaign rally this week, declared at a White House press conference that it was suspicious that AI warnings would “suddenly come up two months before an election.” (The warnings have been coming for years but have grown more urgent.)
On the Hill, Johnson picked up Trump’s “hoax” theme, offering assurances that we’re “not all going to be dead in 10 years.” As for AI companies: “They can self-regulate. They don’t need government to tell them to slow it down.”
Pressed by Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman, Johnson again deflected. “Congress is not the expert on the subject,” he said. “We will be regulating something that we’re not aware of.” Johnson warned of “red tape” and “hyperregulation” strangling the industry and giving the AI advantage to China.
So he’s opting for no regulation. He sent lawmakers home, and the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Brett Guthrie (R-Kentucky), signaled he wasn’t even inclined to take up AI legislation during the lame-duck session in November and December. Next year, he said at a Politico conference, “would be more of the target.”
By then, AI agents may already have taken over the internet, per Amodei’s warning. But what’s the hurry?
Prospects are marginally better in the Senate, where Thune, unlike Johnson, believes that “Congress has a job to do.”
But Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the Senate Commerce Committee chairman, is also in no rush. He twice delayed his committee’s markup of AI legislation this summer and now says it’s his “hope” to have it done this year. Perhaps the delay comes from him spending so much time developing anti-Muslim conspiracy theories, both in the hearing room and at the GOP midterm convention.
That’s why I admire what Kennedy tried to do when he went to the Senate floor with his Hail Mary attempt at enacting an AI “kill switch.”
It wasn’t a crazy idea; Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark has suggested a version of this. But Kennedy wasn’t, perhaps, the best salesman for it. He admitted that he doesn’t “pretend to be an AI expert,” and his description of the idea (like “trying to catch a squirrel in your attic”) ended in him confessing that “I’m probably not explaining this well.”
Still, Kennedy was making a vital point. “We can’t even pass a bill here in the Senate to get money to our military,” he said. “So we’re not going to be able to have a rational debate and reach a decision about what, if and how we should in any way regulate AI. But still we’ve got this risk out there, that we know is real, of one of these models becoming the Terminator. So what do we do about it?”
To nobody’s surprise, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) objected to Kennedy’s “unanimous consent” request, thereby defeating it. Instead, Paul wanted to respond to the emergency by … appointing another committee! “Three Republicans and three Democrats,” he said, would “study how best to ensure the safety of AI, and … report back the solutions to the Commerce Committee.”
Kennedy ridiculed his colleague. “I would rather be condemned to listening to O.J. jokes for the rest of eternity than to replace my suggestion that we do something with a committee — yet another committee,” he said. “Maybe we ought to let Leonardo DiCaprio chair the damn thing.”
The lonely plea to “do something” thus rebuffed, lawmakers returned to doing what this Congress does best: nothing at all.
Dana Milbank is a Washington Sun Perspectives columnist.
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