Reporter’s Notebook: Congress meets AI as fears of human extinction jolt Capitol Hill

Members of Congress returned to Capitol Hill this week in pure freakout mode. There are apocalyptic scenarios about AI seizing control of water systems. Even sending Prince Harry and Meghan Markle back to the United States.

But seriously, there’s real fear that Congress may be running behind on regulating AI. And there are concerns that AI might be developing at such a rapid clip that it’s too late to harness the technology. Suspicion about data centers has long percolated among voters.

Then former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon declared that AI could extinguish humankind within a decade. This came after a swarm of OpenAI agents independently "escaped" isolation – then leveraged security vulnerabilities to hack the artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face. The AI agents weren’t supposed to be capable of any of that.

Researchers say they even used covert methods to communicate with each other via a special language. AI EXTINCTION WARNINGS DOMINATE HEADLINES AFTER EX—ANTHROPIC EMPLOYEE'S VIRAL POST "My phone has been ringing off the hook from a lot of colleagues who really saw the news of the whistleblower as a tipping point," said Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., who has toiled on bipartisan AI legislation.

"Then people hear the words ‘human extinction.’ When they hear loss of control. When they hear ‘catastrophic risk,’ I think (people) are waking up and they're saying, ‘Where the hell is Congress?’" "It's not like we've been sitting on our hands here," said Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., an AI expert who’s worked on bipartisan AI guardrails with Trahan.

"I don't think it's fair to say that there's been a reluctance to act. It's just that the wheels of progress turn very slowly in Congress." FOX NEWS POLL: VOTERS SEE AI REGULATION AS URGENT, RANK SAFEGUARDS AHEAD OF INNOVATION Is this like lawmakers trying to make sense of this new-fangled invention called the internet - or "information superhighway" - back in the 1990s? When it comes to technological innovation, Congress has rarely been ahead of it.