Asked about President Donald Trump’s rant against regulation of future AI development, House Speaker Mike Johnson on Tuesday insisted the media was overreacting to warnings about artificial intelligence going rogue.
Johnson, giving his final weekly press conference ahead of the last week of votes before the House of Representatives breaks to go on the campaign trail, largely sided with Trump, who has said that he should be the only guardrail.
The issue comes as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon are hosting an AI-focused summit on Tuesday.
“If Bernie Sanders is in charge of this thing, he'll just shut it all down, and we're toast,” Johnson told reporters. The Louisiana Republican largely parroted Trump’s argument that if the United States reins in AI too much, then China and its autocratic leader Xi Jinping will “win” the AI race and dominate the tech industry.
“We're not going to take stupid, knee-jerk reaction prescriptions on this,” Johnson told reporters. “We're going to do this right, wisely, carefully to make sure that we maintain our edge.”
Trump and most Republicans have largely promoted AI. He brought on David Sacks, the tech investor, to be the chairman of his council of advisors on science and technology.
But last week, many in Washington expressed alarm after Jacob Coxon, a former researcher for Anthropic, resigned his position and said that “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
That prompted some Democrats and even some conservative Republicans like Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida to say Congress needed to have hearings about AI and the risks it poses. In response, Trump balked.
“The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump said on Truth Social.
The president has also said some of the alarmism around AI is a “HOAX.”
“AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX, no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA — UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #1 — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #2 — and all of the other HOAXES and SCAMS that America was forced to endure through the Destructionists’ and Deviants’ foul play and illegal conduct,” he said.
Johnson repsonded to the president’s comments and sought to clarify them.
“When the president says a hoax, what he's referring to is, we've all seen this movie before,” he said. “We're 49 days out from an election. A catastrophe is created. The media gets spun up. Social media gets spun up.”
The speaker compared it to people saying climate change would cause humanity to go extinct within a few years.
“This is this is what the president is saying is you're not all going to be dead in 10 years, okay? That's a hoax,” he said.
“Listen, AI is serious, we do need to make sure that it's done safely,” he said. “But let's again, let's apply common sense. If you are a company, if you're a corporation in America, including a tech corporation, you have a responsibility to make safe products.”
The words come as many Americans have openly criticized the construction of AI data centers and candidates on both sides of the aisle are running on moratoriums for the centers.
But Johnson said that the United States has laws and regulations under which AI can fall and that product liability laws further provide guidelines for AI.
“Here's the problem: If I called an emergency session today and I brought everybody in the house and said, ‘Let's regulate AI,’ nobody in the room knows yet what that should look like,” Johnson said. “Why? Because we don't have the latest information.”
But polling shows that many Americans do not approve of Trump’s handling of AI. A survey from the University of Massachusetts Amherst shows 57 percent of Americans think the president has handled it poorly.
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