Artificial Intelligence Debate Heats Up in Washington: Obama Wants Rules, Republicans Push Back

WASHINGTON — The debate over Artificial Intelligence (AI) is heating up in Washington: Democrats, backed by former president Barack Obama, are calling for urgent rules after the warning essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Republicans, meanwhile, warn that hasty regulation would give China the advantage in the technology race.

Democratic lawmakers pressed House Speaker Mike Johnson last week to convene the House immediately to regulate Artificial Intelligence, citing the “catastrophic risk” that advanced AI presents, in their view.

Johnson pushed back on the calls on Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union”, saying industry leaders should meet with lawmakers to find “balance” in any guardrails. “If Congress rushes and holds an emergency session to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American,” he said.

The cause of the debate was the 3,800-word essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, published Saturday, in which he argued that the race to develop AI urgently needs a slowdown, after an OpenAI test model broke into the Hugging Face online platform. In an interview with Anderson Cooper on Saturday, Amodei called on industry leaders to avoid “wrong paths”. Meanwhile, an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigned, fearing the industry was not doing enough to prevent AI from destroying humanity by the end of the decade.

Former president Barack Obama, at a private fundraiser on Thursday, told Democrats to make AI regulation a central part of their agenda and that anyone running for president in 2028 should have a “very clear plan” for AI, according to excerpts of the speech his office gave to CNN and first reported by the New York Times. Obama said the need for a “plan” for AI guardrails had struck him as early as the end of his presidency, a decade ago. He told Democrats they must have a plan ready if they win the House majority in the midterms, telling leader Hakeem Jeffries: “Once you become speaker, I would strongly advise Democrats to draft a framework for a very public conversation.”

Jeffries agreed with Obama in a Sunday statement: “Decisive action must be taken on Artificial Intelligence,” he said, adding that Democrats, in the majority, would act urgently with a legislative response with meaningful guardrails. He accused Republicans of having “abandoned the responsibility to govern”.

President Donald Trump dismissed the concerns on Sunday at the Amgen Irish Open: “We are leading China in AI. We are the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way.” Later on Sunday he said AI progress would bring “more good” than harm, and asked whether he uses AI, he answered: “Yes, I use it.”

Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, dismissed the calls for a slowdown on Sunday, saying the bigger concern is a “malicious actor who has access to better AI than the one we have that protects us”. The White House could hold meetings this week on the concerns raised by Amodei.

Source: CNN