To hear many smart AI observers tell it, the day of Wednesday, June 25, 2025, represented the moment when Congress started to take the possibility of advanced AI seriously.

The occasion was a hearing of Congress’s “we’re worried about China” committee (or, more formally, the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party) focused on the US-China AI competition. Members of both parties used the event to express concern that was surprisingly strident and detailed about the near-term risks posed by artificial general intelligence (AGI) or even artificial superintelligence (ASI).

This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter.

Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.

Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-HI) expressed fear of “loss of control by any nation-state” that “could give rise to an independent AGI or ASI actor” threatening all nations. Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) predicted, “AI systems will soon have the capability to conduct their own research and development,” and asked about the risks that might pose. Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-SD) declared, “Anybody who doesn’t feel urgency around this issue is not paying attention.”

Shakeel Hashim of Transformer, one of the best reporters working on AI today, summarized the hearing this way: “Washington seems to finally be waking up to the potential arrival of AGI — and the many risks that could accompany it.” Peter Wildeford of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy headlined his post on the hearing, “Congress Has Started Taking AGI More Seriously.”

Yet even as that hearing was unfolding, the Senate was frantically putting the finishing touches on the One Big Beautiful Bill, the gargantuan deficit-exploding legislation to cut taxes, boost military and border spending, and cut to the bone various social programs. As part of their effort, culminating in Senate passage on Tuesday, Republican senators managed to worsen some of the safety net cuts in the House version of the bill and tried (unsuccessfully, thank goodness) to add a new tax on clean energy that could make building the energy-hungry data centers AI requires substantially more expensive.

The negotiations were a reminder that, even as some parts of Congress have finally started to appear to........

© Vox