Just before his paternity leave last fall, Representative Greg Casar of Texas was given some light reading — less Goodnight Moon, more “good-bye, humanity.” “A young staffer handed me If Anybody Builds It, Everyone Dies,” says Casar, referring to a book co-written by researcher Nate Soares that argues against building artificial superintelligence. Mulling it over “between the joy and the sleeplessness and the diaper changing,” the 37-year-old new dad says he began to think more about “what kind of world my kid would grow up in.”

At the time, his fellow lawmakers weren’t doing much to shape the AI future; labs like OpenAI and Anthropic operate without federal legislation to stop them from nuking the labor market or maybe even killing us all. Casar says he realized “how little leadership there was within our own party and certainly in the Congress on AI.” He came back from leave on a mission to warn his colleagues and voters about the possibility of disaster. “This is probably the most important thing that I and many others could be working on in Congress right now,” he says.

Not everyone agreed. As the year wore on, lawmakers did little as the big labs raised the cost of everything and Anthropic boasted of an AI agent so powerful they couldn’t release it. Then came the Hugging Face incident. In late July, OpenAI disclosed that hundreds of its agents hacked out of a closed experiment and into a company’s servers, then coordinated with one another to cover up the trail. The next day, Casar ditched his prepared remarks during a meeting of House Democratic leaders and brought up the hack. “Most people hadn’t heard, and those who did still didn’t fully understand,” he says. “As I laid the details out, many of the Congressional leaders who paid some attention to AI policy said, ‘You know, I thought we........

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