House Democrats to Prioritize AI Action at Tuesday Meeting

House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on ABC's This Week on 13 September that Congress needs "to begin to act urgently" on AI, and that action on artificial intelligence will be a high priority when House Democrats meet as a caucus on Tuesday morning, according to a transcript published by his office. "We should take decisive action now so that we can slow down, as the CEOs have recently acknowledged, slow down the pace of development in order to protect the American people and ensure that AI is proceeding safely," he said. His remarks came a day after Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called for slowing the pace of frontier AI development.

Jeffries said Speaker Mike Johnson ended a bipartisan AI task force in the US House of Representatives. He also said House Republicans had effectively canceled the last two weeks of the legislative session scheduled for September.

House Democrats formed the Commission on Artificial Intelligence and the Innovation Economy in December and are preparing a policy framework. Asked about proposals to ban artificial superintelligence or require company kill switches, Jeffries did not say whether he supports either, answering that Democrats would have that conversation this week.