How the New Congress Can Save Us From AI Disaster | Rob Wiblin

Rob Wiblin (0:00)

We now know the make up of Congress during what may turn out to be the two most important years for AI that ever occur. Democrats won big time, far more than anyone predicted. They'll have at least 250 seats in the House of Reps, and they'll have 56 out of 100 seats in the Senate, including seats in Mississippi, South Carolina, and Kansas, a place they hadn't won in 100 years. And they won Texas of all places by 11 points, sweeping every office in the state. AI wasn't a top three issue in this election, but it was maybe the fourth or fifth most significant driver of the voter backlash. It's a place where government policy and what voters say they want are just clearly massively out of sync, all of which makes it more likely that Congress takes major action on AI during this crucial window in its development. So what's likely to happen? And what are the most likely ways for things to go really well in the next two years?

Let's start with the bad news, at least from my perspective. Despite the massive shift in Congress and the role that AI played in it, passing a strong standalone AI bill still won't be at all simple. The first threshold one has to cross to have a shot at passing legislation is to get 60 votes in the Senate to overcome the filibuster. That is actually probably possible for an AI bill. The issue is a lot less partisan in Congress than you might expect, given Trump's strong stance against pacing the frontier or any binding AI regulation. Among the general public, Democrats and Republicans feel roughly the same about AI, which is to say remarkably negative. 80% of Americans want the government to keep AI safety rules even if it slows down development, including almost 80% of Republicans. And while 67% of Americans say they think AI is advancing too quickly, just 2% think that it's advancing too slowly. Plus, a number of Republican senators have been leaders in the push to act on AI, including Josh Hawley, John Kennedy and Marsha Blackburn. And we can guess that many are more quietly sympathetic. But the president has a veto over any legislation passed by Congress, and overcoming that would require 67 votes in the Senate and 290 in the House of Reps. With overall concern at today's levels, that is going to be pretty hard to achieve, or it would require watering down the rules to the point that they're not especially useful. But that is far from the end of the road. There are at least four ways Congress can make progress right away, even with a veto hanging over it. The first is to pass the common sense measures that are already popular in both parties, some of which might get 70, 80 or even 90 votes in the Senate. For example, today it seems entirely possible that the Chinese government can and is stealing model weights from USAI companies. In a sense, that actually gives them more extensive access frontier models than the US government itself has. Nobody in Congress likes this situation, and legislation could demand that companies fix it before they keep going training more powerful models. There are probably also bipartisan majorities in Congress for restoring and strengthening export controls to China and law enforcement against chip smuggling, which I think would strengthen the U.S.'s negotiating position if it ever does want to push for an AI treaty with China. It's less clear, but there are also indications that there might be congressional supermajorities in favor of things like whistleblower protections for AI staff or mandatory incident reporting Congress and also so-called kill switches. As the water level rises, the range of provisions that can attract a majority support in both parties is only going to keep growing.

Second, there's must pass legislation, the bills that keep the government funded, like the annual defense bill. These are hard for a president to veto because it means a government shutdown or no defense budget. So this is where negotiated deals between parties get done. The most obvious thing to try to include in such a deal is proper funding to build out Caissi, the likely home of USAI regulation, something that I'll come back to later. The third pathway is the least significant, but I'll mention it anyway. Cabinet secretaries and many other senior officials need to be confirmed by the Senate, so senators can grill nominees for AI relevant roles and vote down or hold up anyone whose views on AI are badly out of step with those of the Senate itself.

The fourth pathway is quite big. It's to hold hearings and collect information. There's so many things that Senate and the House should demand that company staff answer under oath. For example, what is the full story of the hack where an AI swarm took over an OpenAI research cluster? It's still not been told. OpenAI also says it has evidence that using looped transformers didn't reduce monitorability much. What are all of the experiments that they conducted to assess that? Over at Anthropic, what evidence do they have that pushing ahead with more and more recursive self-improvement is safe or not? What models are OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Training right now and how much compute are they using? And have these companies conducted any safety tests with results so embarrassing that they didn't publish them? These are all great questions to ask and probably quite fun for members of Congress as well.