Summary
Lawmakers on a House Oversight Committee subcommittee met Thursday for a discussion of artificial intelligence and quickly shifted from general policy questions to a wider set of fears about what the technology could enable and how fast it is changing. The subcommittee roundtable, titled “Artificial Intelligence and American Power,” brought executives from AI firms, academics, and corporate leaders who implement AI into the same room as lawmakers.
Rep. Dave Min, a California Democrat, told colleagues that people in their districts “are going to start feeling impacts very soon,” and warned that lawmakers must respond “proactively” before the challenges AI creates become unmanageable. Min’s comments came as other members pressed for guardrails that they said should keep pace with the technology.
Maxwell Frost, Florida’s ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, said he was optimistic about AI’s potential to cure diseases and boost the economy, but argued that lawmakers could fall behind. Frost said he “don’t have faith in this institution to actually put the common sense guardrails in place,” adding that without early action, “we fast forward ten years, and the house is on fire.”
Republicans and Democrats also focused on concrete scenarios they said could affect Americans’ privacy, government operations and national security. Rep. James Walkinshaw, a Virginia Republican, expressed alarm that federal workers might use AI chatbots to handle sensitive government data. Rep. William Timmons of South Carolina raised the question of whether it should be illegal for AI systems to use someone’s likeness to create pornographic images.
Other lawmakers described concerns tied to how AI could affect military decision-making. Rep. John McGuire, also of Virginia, said he was worried that AI systems could deny U.S. military forces from taking lethal actions because of a model’s conclusion for “moral” behavior. Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona said she raised questions about the Trump administration’s use of AI in the war with Iran, as well as AI’s intensive energy usage and potential climate impacts.
Before the safety-focused exchanges, Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri kicked off the meeting by praising the industry’s progress and describing how one panelist’s company used AI to automate and fast-track manufacturing in its factories. Burlison said it was “truly like the closest thing to Star Trek I’ve ever seen,” and later asked what congressional districts could do to attract AI firms for business.
Several lawmakers also asked about how AI developers manage emerging models that they described as unusually capable. In particular, members raised concerns about disclosures from technology firms including Anthropic, which has said its Mythos AI model has capabilities so powerful that it limits its use to selected customers, including the model’s apparent ability to bypass traditional cybersecurity and hack banks, government agencies and major corporations.
Mark Beall, president of government affairs at the AI Policy Network Inc. and a former Pentagon official, warned that Congress risks losing the country’s competitive edge on AI if it does not address key national security concerns. Robert Atkinson, founder of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told lawmakers, “I don’t think it’s going to kill us,” but added that the federal government should “seriously fund AI safety research” because “We need to know a lot more about how the models work.”
Spencer Overton, a George Washington University law professor, said the incentives for AI companies “are really what they should be” and argued that constituents look to lawmakers to act. Overton said, “Constituents are looking for you, not for companies, to step up and protect them,” and added that constituents trust the elected members “to do that.”
The roundtable underscored how lawmakers, even when approaching AI from different political angles, converged on calls for attention to guardrails, safety research and oversight—particularly as they described concerns about misuse of likeness, energy and climate effects, and how AI systems could affect government and military decisions.
Eli Crane, an Arizona Republican and former Navy SEAL, also raised the existential question directly, saying, “That being said, does anyone on this panel feel or believe, in any way, that as we are going down the road in this AI race, we might be simultaneously engineering our own destruction?”