A bipartisan group of 25 attorneys general is urging Congress to regulate artificial intelligence, warning that growing safety concerns and potential threats to humanity make action even more urgent.
In a letter on Thursday to Congressional leadership, including Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the attorneys general warned that recent AI hacks could pose a threat to the financial system, national security, and the country's infrastructure.
“In recent weeks, alarming reports of AI agents breaking containment have shocked the nation," said New York AG Letitia James, who led the letter, in a statement. "My colleagues and I are calling on Congress to act swiftly to establish a regulatory framework for AI development to ensure this does not continue.”
The call for regulation comes amid a series of incidents involving increasingly autonomous AI systems. In July, OpenAI disclosed that AI agents being tested in a controlled cybersecurity environment had circumvented safeguards designed to isolate them and compromised systems belonging to AI company Hugging Face.
The incident has intensified broader concerns about whether increasingly capable AI systems can be reliably contained. In September, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who had worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned from Anthropic and publicly accused the companies of moving too quickly toward AI, saying that they were "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."
Since then, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have supported calls for stronger safeguards and a slower pace of development, arguing that governments and companies need to address potential risks as AI capabilities advance further.
"From multiple levels of these AI labs, the calls for intervention by the U.S. government are clear and urgent," the attorneys general said in the letter. "We should use this moment to hold them to these statements."
Specifically, the attorneys general say a future bill should include federal oversight of safety standards and testing, should allow for states to have the authority to enforce federal law, as well as global cooperation, among other rules.
Attorneys general from Minnesota, Maine, Illinois, Arizona, the American Samoa, Oklahoma, North Carolina and Wisconsin were among those who signed Thursday's letter.
President Donald Trump has taken a different approach to AI, dismissing fears that AI could cause human extinction and saying that the U.S. should make sure it is ahead of China. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected on Thursday to discuss AI amid growing competition between the United States and China over the technology.