The debate over AI has taken over Washington

The Economist

5 min read17 Sep 2026, 10:49 PM IST

Summary

Donald Trump, the president, is unmoved by the torrent of such demands. AI’s supposed risks to humanity, he wrote on social media, were a “hoax”. 

FEW EVENTS have brought together Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon, political firebrands from opposite ends of the spectrum, in common cause. But the Pro-Human Assembly in Washington, DC on September 15th, a gathering of people alarmed by the rapid advance of artificial intelligence, managed it. Both men warned of the unchecked power of tech “oligarchs” and called for urgent legislation to slow down the technology.

Donald Trump, the president, is unmoved by the torrent of such demands. AI’s supposed risks to humanity, he wrote on social media, were a “hoax”. America’s aim was to beat China; proponents of a slowdown were “treasonists”. But in recent days, political momentum for tighter controls has gathered with unusual speed.

The Pro-Human Assembly and Mr Trump’s flurry of posts on the subject came less than a week after the public resignation of Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic, an AI firm. Mr Coxon said that he and his colleagues believed that AI could “kill us all” by the end of the decade, a message that he promptly delivered across prime-time television. Another top scientist at the firm put the probability of extinction at more than 10%.

That has made many politicians sit up. But despite the mixed politics of the Pro-Human Assembly, a partisan divide remains. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leaders in the House and Senate, respectively, called for urgent action. Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House, warned against hasty regulation. “If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI,” said Mr Johnson, “we will lose the race to China”. AI labs, he argued, should “self-police”.