“If we had a solution”
House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Sunday that he would call the House back from its recess to vote on artificial intelligence safeguards only “if we had a solution”, pushing back on Democrats who want lawmakers to return early. Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press, Johnson said Congress needed guardrails but had to balance them against keeping the United States ahead of China, Axios reported.
On CNN’s State of the Union he went further. Lawmakers “have to resist Congress jumping in and imposing some sort of emergency moratorium,” Johnson said, according to MS NOW. “China will overlap us, and that’s the challenge: it’s national security balanced with the immediate security of making sure the models are safe.”
Rather than writing rules first, Johnson said he wanted to organise a meeting between President Donald Trump, members of Congress and the heads of the leading AI companies. He would prefer the companies to take responsibility for the safety of their own products, Axios reported.
Trump points to “negative forces”
Trump, asked in Ireland on Sunday whether the industry should slow down or face more regulation, framed the question as one of competition. “We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world,” he said at his golf resort in Doonbeg, according to MS NOW.
He allowed that “we can put guardrails, we can do this and that”, but added: “I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that … shouldn’t be bringing it up,” the Associated Press reported. He did not say who he meant, and he did not propose any specific rules.
Why Washington is suddenly talking about pace
The weekend’s comments respond to a sharp turn in the industry’s own rhetoric. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay arguing that the leading labs should pace the frontier, including by giving independent evaluators embedded access to their systems. OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk both responded positively, TechCrunch reported.
That leaves an unusual alignment of positions. Several of the companies building the most capable systems say they are willing to go slower, while the Republican leadership in Washington says the first priority is not losing ground to China.
Democrats want it on the agenda now
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has called for Congress to act to slow the pace of development and protect Americans. He said House Democrats would meet on Tuesday to discuss AI, and the AP reported that he described it as a high priority.
Former President Barack Obama made a similar case to the party days earlier. Interviewed by Jeffries at a Democratic fundraiser on Thursday, Obama said Democrats needed to “have a very clear plan” for the technology’s economic effects and safety, according to TechCrunch, which cited a partial transcript first reported by The New York Times.
“This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous,” Obama said.
Obama has also offered himself as a sounding board to AI executives and has spoken to both Amodei and Altman, TechCrunch reported.
What to watch
Tuesday’s House Democratic meeting is the first concrete date. Whether it produces legislative text rather than a statement will show how hard Democrats intend to push while the House is out of session.
The other marker is Johnson’s proposed meeting with Trump and the AI company chiefs. He has not given it a date. Until it has one, the Speaker’s position amounts to waiting for the industry to say what rules it can live with.
