Washington split on AI safety the morning after the labs asked for a referee
House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday that Congress will not lead the charge on regulating AI safety, Donica Phifer at Axios reports. The same morning, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries told ABC's This Week that lawmakers need to begin to act urgently on artificial intelligence.
On CNN's State of the Union, Johnson said Congress should resist "jumping in and imposing some sort of emergency moratorium. It's got to be done right, safely, wisely." A moratorium is a temporary freeze. On NBC's Meet the Press he said he would recall the House and schedule a vote "if we had a solution," but any action must be careful.
He wants guardrails so AI "doesn't run away," without losing the edge with China, which he called a "national security threat." He prefers company leaders take "corporate responsibility" rather than "cry out for us to stop it."
Johnson also wants a meeting of President Trump, members of Congress, and top AI company officials. The comments mirror David Sacks, the former White House AI czar (the administration's AI policy lead), late Saturday: labs should pace on their own without government intervention. Pacing means deliberately slowing how fast the smartest models improve.
Jeffries, in the ABC interview filed by Isabel Danzis, said: "We certainly need to begin to act urgently…" and "take decisive action now so that we can slow down, as the CEOs have recently acknowledged, slow down the pace of development in order to protect the American people…"
The Democratic caucus, the party's House members meeting as a group, plans to meet Tuesday. Jeffries said a "high priority will be action on artificial intelligence."
CNN's Jake Tapper noted that several AI leaders agreed with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's Saturday essay proposing a slower development pace and more safety measures. Johnson's reply: companies "all have very different ideas on what the guardrails should be. There's no consensus among them."
The labs spent the week asking for a peer brake and for outside desks. Sunday delivered the congressional split.
The Speaker's answer is corporate responsibility first. The Democratic leader's answer is decisive action now and a Tuesday agenda slot.
One chamber. Two Sunday shows. No shared referee yet.