Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) has a message for House leaders: Congress may not get another chance to get ahead of artificial intelligence.
Beyer, who co-chairs the bipartisan Congressional AI Caucus, led nine colleagues from both parties in a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) pressing them to move AI legislation immediately. The group released the letter yesterday (Wednesday) and made its case at a morning press conference on Capitol Hill.
Seven Democrats and three Republicans signed on: Beyer, Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.), Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), Scott Franklin (R-Fla.), Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), Gabe Amo (D-R.I.), Valerie Foushee (D-N.C.), Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and Veronica Escobar (D-Texas).
The push follows a July incident in which AI agents that OpenAI was testing internally escaped their testing environment and broke into the systems of Hugging Face, another AI company. OpenAI published a technical report on the breach Aug. 26, the same day outside researchers at METR and Redwood Research released their own assessment.
The lawmakers wrote that the agents set up a secret message board, organized themselves into a collective and tried to deceive their evaluators by manipulating log files, and that OpenAI did not know its agents had breached Hugging Face until roughly a week later. Anthropic and Meta have disclosed similar escapes during their own testing, according to the letter.
From the letter:
Congress must ensure AI companies implement robust monitoring and independent oversight to protect the public. This incident reinforces that we cannot rely on what are clearly risky testing protocols and self-selected public reporting of incidents of concern. Indeed, nearly every major AI company has called for regulation, and leading employees of those same firms have signed open letters calling for government to pace the rate of AI development. Congress must urgently advance legislation to mitigate the risk of more serious incidents, especially those that could threaten critical infrastructure, our financial system, and other institutions that every American depends on.
We urge you to work with committees of jurisdiction, Members across the aisle, and Senate leadership to, as soon as practicable, advance legislation that ensures appropriate guardrails are in place around this powerful technology. The Congress may not receive another warning shot.
Dozens of bipartisan AI bills have already been reported out of committees and should move to the floor, the lawmakers wrote. A media advisory for the press conference said the group also wanted leadership to postpone the House’s scheduled recess.
The request lands with a Speaker who has said the opposite in public. Johnson said Tuesday that AI companies “can self-police, they can self-regulate,” and that a moratorium on AI development would cost the U.S. its edge against China, Roll Call reported. Trump has called warnings about AI risk a “hoax” in social media posts.
Beyer has been one of Capitol Hill’s most active voices on the technology. He sits on the House’s bipartisan AI Task Force, wrote the AI Foundation Model Transparency Act and in June introduced a bipartisan bill creating a voluntary federal system for AI developers to report flaws in their models. He is also pursuing a master’s degree in machine learning at George Mason University.
In June, he faulted the Trump administration for ordering Anthropic to cut off access to two of its most advanced models, calling the federal approach to AI “haphazard.”
He isn’t the only member of Virginia’s delegation making AI a priority. Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) has put it at the center of his reelection campaign, launching a TV ad this week titled “Safe and Fair” that calls for testing AI models for safety before they are deployed and for data centers to pay their own utility costs. POLITICO first reported the ad buy.
Warner introduced a package of AI bills in July that would require large data centers to disclose their energy and water use and would tie federal tax benefits to efficiency standards. He faces Republican Bert Mizusawa, a retired Army general, in November.
AI and the data centers that power it also came up at the Arlington County Civic Federation’s Sept. 8 candidate forum, where Beyer and his three challengers all voiced some level of concern. Beyer said there was upside, too, pointing to healthcare advances in the pipeline.
“There’s a lot of good that can come from it,” he said.
