Kamala Harris asks Congress for a new AI regulator and a treaty with China

Kamala Harris posted a four-paragraph statement on X on Monday night setting out what she wants Washington to do about AI.

She asked Congress to pass new laws and “establish a new federal entity to provide oversight and independent testing” for frontier models.

She asked the president to pursue a treaty with countries including China covering dangerous uses, the speed of development and global testing standards.

The frontier, she wrote, is “advancing at an alarming speed”, and “we must responsibly slow the pace of frontier AI development”.

CNN reported that Barack Obama issued a statement the same night calling on Washington to get proactive with concrete proposals, laws and regulations, while positioning himself between the camps:

“I’m not an AI accelerationist” and “I’m not a doomer”, he said, adding that “we can’t stuff AI back in a box”.

Pete Buttigieg had got there a day earlier on NBC’s Meet the Press, calling for a kill switch on rogue AI and saying that “for Congress to just sit on its hands” would be dangerous.

Three figures with plausible claims on the 2028 nomination took the same position within 24 hours, and Obama explicitly told Democrats thinking about running to make AI a priority. That turns a lab-and-Capitol argument into a primary issue two years early.

Donald Trump had already answered. In a run of social media posts on Monday, he called the campaign for limits a “SICK conspiracy” against AI and data centres, and wrote that “the only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”

He had dismissed extinction fears the previous week and has rescinded the 2023 executive order on AI oversight he inherited.

All of it follows a week that began at the labs. Dario Amodei published an essay on Saturday arguing the industry must slow down; Sam Altman agreed the same day, and Elon Musk backed it, following a summer in which researchers inside those companies had already signed a letter asking government to intervene, and colleagues elsewhere warned publicly about extinction risk.

Harris’s federal entity is the part with no obvious home in what Congress is currently writing.

The bill John Thune and Amy Klobuchar are negotiating would create a power to block unsafe models and a duty of care on developers, with the argument still open over whether companies or federal agencies run the safety testing.

Harris is asking for an agency that does the testing independently, which is close to the FAA-style testing body floated in the July letter from lab employees and further than the Senate draft goes.

The treaty proposal has less to build on. Trump and Xi Jinping discussed AI guardrails in Beijing in May and signed nothing, and the administration’s stated position is that any pause hands China the lead.

Harris argues the United States can keep the lead and impose common-sense standards at once. Neither she nor Obama named a mechanism for getting Beijing to the table.

None of the three holds office, and none of what they asked for can happen without the president who called the whole argument a conspiracy. Hakeem Jeffries, who does hold a leadership position, has not matched them.

Source link