House Speaker Mike Johnson argued that it is the AI industry’s responsibility to ensure its technology is safe, saying that government regulation of the space could “smother American innovation.”
Johnson appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday morning for a 16-minute conversation with Jake Tapper. During the interview, Johnson was pressed on leading AI CEOs’ shared call for a global slowdown of the technology’s development amid mounting safety concerns regarding self-improving models that act without human intervention.
“The guys that are calling for this are the ones that are pushing the frontier. If they want to slow that down, that’s fine. But we also, at the same time, have to resist Congress jumping in and imposing some sort of emergency moratorium,” Johnson said. “They need to come together in a meeting with us and sit down and figure out what the right balance is. We cannot put a moratorium on this because China will overlap us. That’s the challenge. It’s national security, balanced with the immediate security of making sure the models are safe.”
Tapper underlined the urgency of AI executives’ call for a slowdown. In an essay published Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote that the industry “must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models” and called to “partner with government to formalize the idea of permanent embedded evaluators to better prevent and document the internal alignment incidents,” like unsanctioned cyberattacks enacted by OpenAI models in recent months. Two rival executives, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and xAI CEO Elon Musk, shared Amodei’s statement concurring with its sentiment.
“We don’t need everybody to panic right now,” Johnson continued. “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.”
Tapper told Johnson, “I promise you nobody is going to accuse Congress of racing to do anything about AI,” drawing a laugh from the speaker.
Johnson’s line matched President Trump’s on Sunday, who spoke to CBS News at the Irish Open
“We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way because who wins AI wins,” he said. “We can put guardrails. We can do this and that. But I think you have a lot of negative forces bringing it up, that shouldn’t be bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”
