{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://carson.house.gov/media/press-releases/carson-demands-congress-stay-session-confront-ai-crisis", "Carson Demands Congress Stay in Session to Confront AI Crisis", "2026-09-17", "2026", "2026-09", "Democrat", "House", "IN", "Andr\u00e9 Carson", "C001072", "carson.house.gov", "carson", "https://carson.house.gov/media/press-releases", "scraper", "WASHINGTON, D.C. \u2013 107 House Democrats are demanding that Congress stay in session and vote on legislation creating AI safeguards.\n\n\u201cRepublican leadership canceled votes Thursday instead of taking action on AI,\u201d said Congressman Andr\u00e9 Carson (IN-07). \u201cThere is ample evidence of cybersecurity concerns, surveillance, and the risk of rogue AI agents. Instead of addressing these concerns, Speaker Johnson is giving a free pass to tech companies. The pace of AI development means these are urgent concerns. AI needs to be regulated \u2013 and we need to act now.\u201d\n\nDownload the letter to Speaker Mike Johnson here. The full text of the letter can be found below.\n\nDear Speaker Johnson:\n\nWe write to urge you to keep the House of Representatives in session to enable Congress to take urgent action to address the catastrophic risks posed by advanced artificial intelligence. Those risks take any of several forms, separately and in combination\u2014of agentic misalignment, mass cybersecurity breaches, and development of biological or chemical weapons.\n\nReasonable minds may disagree about precisely how Congress should regulate this rapidly evolving technology.\n\nWe cannot disagree about the imperative for Congress to act.\n\nInstead of action, you have announced vacation. After a month-long August recess, the House leadership changed the schedule to announce two more weeks of vacation\u2013immediately prior to yet another month of recess in October.\n\nAmple evidence\u2014in the form of a series of public disclosures from the companies and researchers developing the world's most capable AI systems\u2014underscores the urgency of the moment:\n\nIn July, OpenAI models undergoing cybersecurity evaluations bred swarms of agents that circumvented controls designed to isolate them from the internet, conspired to exploit vulnerabilities, hacked third-party systems, and altered evidence of their activity, an incident that OpenAI has called a \"warning shot,\" about the risks of highly capable rogue AI agents.\n\nDays later, more than 1,300 top employees of frontier AI companies called on the U.S. government to support an international effort to develop tools that can \u201cdeliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.\u201d\n\nMore recently, Anthropic disrupted cases in which researchers used Claude for biological research that could have aided the development of biological weapons, and called biological misuse \u201cone of the most serious risks of frontier AI models.\u201d\n\nAnthropic also documented China-linked actors using Claude for surveillance and transnational repression, and Iran-linked actors using it for propaganda, mass surveillance, and targeting recommendations against U.S. naval forces.\n\nMeanwhile, CISA reported Chinese open-weight models accelerating their capabilities through \u201cindustrial-scale\u201d distillation of American models\u2014giving rise to AI agents nearly as powerful as the top U.S. frontier models, yet wholly unconstrained by American authorities or by U.S. safeguards.\n\nThese disclosures must not constitute yet another in a long series of \u201cwarning shots,\u201d but rather, a starting gun.\n\nCongress must act.\n\nA series of proposals have emerged from our colleagues that deserve consideration, public debate, thoughtful amendment, and action. They include bills mandating transparency and evaluation of frontier models, \u201ckill switch\u201d requirements, and a waiver of antitrust laws to enable critical industry-wide collaboration on safety and security. Whether with these proposals or any other variants, AI experts and leading companies agree that the United States can lead the world in artificial intelligence while establishing reasonable safeguards that protect Americans and our national security. We can\u2014and must\u2014do both.\n\nWhile AI safety experts and Americans increasingly urge action to confront this conflagration of risk, Congress fiddles. When we did return to work after the August recess, we consumed floor time with debates and votes on performative resolutions opposing socialism. After next week, the House resumes its vacation\u2014for another six weeks.\n\nYou can forgive every American who believes that Congress remains unserious about confronting our nation\u2019s most pressing challenges.\n\nThe House should remain in session until Congress advances meaningful, bipartisan AI safeguards. To our children who will have read a post-apocalyptic history, \u201cWhy Congress Slept\u201d \u2014likely written by agentic AI\u2014our inaction will be inexplicable and unforgivable.", 1, "2026-09-18T09:27:43Z", "2026-09-18T09:29:09Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://carson.house.gov/media/press-releases/carson-demands-congress-stay-session-confront-ai-crisis"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 73.48820101469755, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}