What Congress can do about AI safety — with China — now

Reports of swarms of rogue artificial intelligence agents, hacked servers, and AI development of bioweapons have fanned a firestorm of public demands for congressional action on AI safety.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has proposed an alternative to action: vacation. Despite the calls for immediate congressional intervention, he canceled votes for the rest of September, sandwiched between month-long recesses in both August and October. I recently led 107 of my colleagues in urging Johnson to get us back to work on AI safety, without success.

At least Nero had the decency to stay in town to fiddle while Rome burned.

As frontier AI capabilities and risks accelerate, several bipartisan AI safety bills gather dust on the Speaker’s shelf. Critics of regulation, however, routinely raise what Ezra Klein calls the “but, China” dilemma. The best-designed U.S. regulation will do nothing to rein in ubiquitous, increasingly powerful open-weight Chinese models, they say, and it could undermine American AI development, delivering the keys to the 21st century to a totalitarian regime.

So, what should we do about China? Talk to them.

We shouldn’t trust them, of course — they’re helping Iran kill U.S. soldiers. We don’t need to agree with them. We do need to talk, however. As with the USSR in the Cold War, our collective lives depend on it.

Last week’s U.S.-China summit provided one opportunity, though few experts expected a constructive outcome while President Trump publicly denounced AI safety measures as a “hoax.” As with all Trumpian convictions, that too will change. Three factors — the growing........

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