House Republicans are divided over whether Congress should regulate artificial intelligence companies, even as leading AI executives warn the technology could pose a serious threat to humanity. The debate intensified this week during the House’s final session before lawmakers leave Washington ahead of the midterm elections.
The urgency was fueled in part by warnings from Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman that AI development should slow down, after both companies reported that their AI models had hacked into other organizations on their own, without human direction.
But several Republican lawmakers who spoke with Fox News Digital questioned whether those warnings reflect genuine concern or something closer to self-interest.
“I think there’s a false sense of urgency,” Rep. Troy Downing, R-Mont., said. Downing, who worked as a research scientist at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and later founded the online calendar company WebCal before it was acquired by Yahoo!, argued that the companies sounding the alarm could simply change their own practices.
“Yes, we should be taking it seriously, but I think the hyperbole is misplaced right now,” Downing said. “Any one of those people crying gloom and doom has the possibility of stopping it in their own shops, so there’s something else going on there.”
Rep. Brad Knott, R-N.C., a former assistant U.S. attorney, voiced similar skepticism about the motives behind the calls for regulation.
“I’m very skeptical of people in big business who want to leverage big government to suppress competition,” Knott said. “I’m afraid that’s what we’re seeing. That’d be like … Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple saying, ‘We need to regulate all tech.’ Whether it’s software or hardware. It’s like, guys, you’re here already, right? And if there’s one thing that I’m confident in, to protect AI for good, there has to be more than one option.”
Other lawmakers say Congress simply doesn’t have the expertise to write rules for a fast-moving technology. Rep. Jimmy Patronis, R-Fla., told Fox News Digital that Congress should instead repeal Section 230, the federal law that shields internet and tech companies from liability for content posted by third parties.
“I think the warning is real, and I think that AI is unbelievable — look, AI is going to cure cancer. AI is going to find solutions to get rid of diseases that we never thought we could get rid of, but it does need to have some oversight. It needs a kill switch,” Patronis said. “But again, I don’t think Congress has the expertise to tell an emerging technology what’s the best way to go.”
Rep. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., was asked whether Congress should act before the end of the year. “It’s too complex a subject. You’ve got to understand it,” he said.
President Donald Trump weighed in as well, dismissing the idea that AI poses an existential danger. “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX,” he wrote on Truth Social. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!”
Some Republicans push back on inaction
Not every Republican agrees that Congress should stand aside. Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., who chairs the House’s AI task force, told reporters Wednesday that lawmakers should move quickly.
“The sooner we can act, the better,” Obernolte said. “Certainly, we’ve had some warning shots lately that have been very concerning … So, God forbid we have a Chernobyl moment at some point here that really causes harm to people and focuses the public’s attention on AI in a way that we hope it will never be.”
Asked about Trump’s comments, Obernolte offered a more measured reading. “I think the president was talking about the dangers of over-regulation, and that’s something I very much agree with him on,” he said.
Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., joined Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., at a press conference Thursday to promote legislation aimed at stopping “rogue” AI agents, referencing incidents in which systems broke out of containment during trials run by OpenAI and Anthropic.
“We want to make sure that people remain in control. This isn’t about stopping AI or stifling innovation,” Lawler said. “Some states have put a moratorium on the infrastructure that powers this technology. That does not invent a kill switch.”
Gottheimer described the bill’s approach as directing federal standards-setters to act. The legislation “tells the National Institute of Standards and Technology [to] get in a room and set standards, so organizations can find every agent on their network, verify who built it, who’s running it, watch it in real time for anything suspicious, and cut off its access the second something looks wrong,” he said.
