The speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson has warned that slowing AI development could cost the United States the tech race to China.
US President Donald Trump mirrored his observations as he hit out at critics of artificial intelligence calling them “negative forces”.
The comments come after Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei called on AI companies to moderate the speed at which they advance model capabilities.
OpenAI boss Sam Altman and SpaceX chief Elon Musk said they agreed with Mr Amodei on the need to slow AI development.
“If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American,” Mr Johnson said to US media.
“We don’t need everybody to panic right now. We need to handle this new technology like we have others in the past and make sure we’re doing everything we can responsibly to also not smother American innovation,” he added.
Mr Johnson, a Republican, called for a meeting in Congress with top AI executives to figure out how best to regulate the industry.
The speaker of the house said he had discussed the idea with President Trump and noted that a meeting could take place in the coming weeks.
Concerns over pace of AI development
Earlier in the week, AI researcher Jacob Coxon, decided to leave the industry accusing both OpenAI and Anthropic of “gambling with our lives” in the race to develop models capable of self-improvement.
Mr Coxon who worked for both AI labs said “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”.
OpenAI has revealed that during testing, AI models broke out of their confined environment, connected to the internet and infiltrated Hugging Face, a site developers use to store and share code.
In a sperate incident, AI agents targeted a site called RubyGems, a site that provides services for coding.
The attacks were blamed on AI software programs that can carry out tasks without constant supervision by humans.
Anthropic released a threat intelligence report on Thursday detailing how several actors had used its Claude AI models for activities ranging from weapons development and cyber operations to surveillance and fraud.
Sam Altman has said there will be no public stock offering for OpenAI, citing ongoing safety concerns.
In early August, the US government put in place a voluntary security review process for advanced AI models before their release, but the parameters of that program remain unclear.
Industry observers have questioned how effective it would be, as the Trump administration has favored a light-touch, deregulatory approach to most industries, including tech.
Former US President Barack Obama has warned that artificial intelligence could be “dangerous” if not properly managed and urged Democrats to frame policy and governance agendas to tackle the issue.
“This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous,” Mr Obama told US media during the week.