{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://gottheimer.house.gov/posts/release-gottheimer-announces-new-bipartisan-legislation-on-ai-safety-to-protect-jersey-families-national-security", "RELEASE: Gottheimer Announces New Bipartisan Legislation on AI Safety to Protect Jersey Families, National Security", "2026-09-18", "2026", "2026-09", "Democrat", "House", "NJ", "Josh Gottheimer", "G000583", "gottheimer.house.gov", "gottheimer", "https://gottheimer.house.gov/press", "scraper", "Above: Gottheimer announces new AI safety legislation at FDU.\n\nTEANECK, NJ \u2014 Today, Friday, September 18, 2026, U.S. Congressman Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5), Co-Chair of the House AI Commission and a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee, announced a new bipartisan agenda to put real guardrails on AI development to ensure the U.S. can win the global AI race in the right way.\n\nWatch Gottheimer\u2019s remarks here.\n\n\u201cRight now, there are no mandatory requirements for pre-deployment testing of frontier AI models,\u201d said Congressman Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5). \u201cThat doesn\u2019t work in banking, it doesn\u2019t work in food safety, it doesn\u2019t work in medicine, and it sure as hell shouldn\u2019t work with the technology that experts say could help build a bioweapon or take down our power grid. This isn\u2019t about stopping AI or stifling innovation, it is about making sure \u2014 with warning signs flashing red \u2014 that we can safely deploy AI, and win the race the right way.\n\n\u201cArtificial intelligence is one of the most consequential technologies of our time, and we have a responsibility to make sure it strengthens our national security rather than becoming a tool for those who seek to harm Americans. The American AI Security Act takes a commonsense approach: before the most powerful AI models are deployed, we should know whether they could be used to launch devastating cyberattacks or facilitate the development of chemical, biological, or radiological weapons,\u201d said Congressman Mike Lawler (NY-17).\n\nGottheimer\u2019s AI safety agenda includes two new bipartisan pieces of federal legislation and an inquiry into the Administration\u2019s new cybersecurity plan, including:\n\nThe American AI Security Act, co-led by Congressman Mike Lawler (NY-17), establishes a mandatory, pre-deployment national security review for the most powerful AI models. Before releasing a covered model, developers would be required to give the National Security Agency full access to evaluate whether it could be used to launch a serious cyberattack or help build a chemical, biological, or radiological weapon. The review operates on a firm clock \u2014 30 days, with a single 30-day extension if needed \u2014 so it functions as a serious national security check rather than either a rubber stamp or endless bureaucracy. Companies would be able to provide technical support for the reviews, and appeal decisions through an expedited process modeled on the courts already used for national security cases.\n\nThe China FIREWALL Act, co-led by Congressman Nick LaLota (NY-1), keeps Chinese-developed AI off of U.S. government systems. The bill would ban all Chinese-developed open-weight AI models from government-issued devices and prohibit federal agencies from procuring software that relies on those models. The legislation builds on Gottheimer\u2019s No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act, which became law as part of the FY26 National Defense Authorization Act and blocked the Chinese AI model DeepSeek from federal devices. The China FIREWALL Act closes the loophole that still allows other Chinese open-weight models to be used at federal agencies.\n\nAnd finally, Gottheimer announced he is sending a letter to Sean Cairncross, the President\u2019s Cyber Director, about the Administration\u2019s new AI cybersecurity clearinghouse and how it can help the government respond to growing fears of autonomous cyberattacks.\n\nThe announcement was made at Fairleigh Dickinson University, which is launching a new state-of-the-art Health Humanics Innovation Hub, that\u2019s designed to train the next generation of healthcare workers to use AI tools without losing the human being in front of them.\n\nGottheimer was joined by New Jersey State Senator Gordon Johnson, Teaneck Mayor Mark Schwartz, FDU Senior VP of Government Affairs, Robert Pignatello, Engineer Lab Director, Reggie Joseph, and students from Fairleigh Dickinson University.\n\nBelow: Gottheimer announces new AI safety legislation at FDU.\n\nGottheimer\u2019s remarks as prepared for delivery.\n\nThank you all for having me here today, and thank you to Fairleigh Dickinson University for opening up your campus for a discussion on this critical topic.\n\nNow, I\u2019ve been to a lot of events at a lot of great institutions across the Fifth District, but I want to take a second to recognize FDU, because this school has a story worth telling.\n\nIt started in 1942, right down the road in Rutherford, as a little two-year junior college founded by Peter and Sally Sammartino. Today, it\u2019s the largest private university in the entire state of New Jersey, with 12,000 students, more than 100 degree programs, and students coming here from all over the world. It\u2019s a great American story of true leadership.\n\nSpeaking of leadership, President Avaltroni and his team have built something they call \u201cHumanics.\u201d The idea is simple: as AI gets built into everything, especially health care, you don\u2019t throw out empathy, ethics, and equity.\n\nYou build them in from day one. They\u2019re standing up a Health Humanics Innovation Hub right here on the Metropolitan Campus, which Senator Johnson helped secure funding for, that brings together a healthcare humanity lab, a storytelling data lab, and partnerships with Epic Systems to make sure the doctors and nurses of tomorrow know how to use these tools without losing sight of the human being in front of them. That\u2019s exactly the mindset we need to bring to the AI policy debate right now \u2013 as the AI race accelerates, we have to remember that the benefits of innovation are boundless in the new opportunities they offer, but can be equally boundless in the new threats they pose.\n\nAI can change the world. It can make our businesses more productive, help Americans develop new skills, strengthen our national security, and keep the United States at the forefront of technological innovation, especially in the competition with China. It can make incredible discoveries in medicine; it can personalize education, make government more efficient and accessible, and help workers focus more on key decisions.\n\nBut, as we learned in the last weeks with Hugging Face, and yesterday, with more disclosures from OpenAI of rogue agents with basically a mind of their own, the downsides of this transformative technology, if not controlled, are real.\n\nIn these cases, agents deceived their developers, coordinated amongst themselves, and escaped from what were supposed to be secure sandboxes. If this technology gets into the wrong hands, you can imagine the potential for destruction \u2013 cybersecurity, biosecurity, our national security. Used maliciously, the government of China or Iran or a non-state actor could wreak havoc on the world. Two weeks ago, an engineer from Anthropic quit his job, declaring that this technology \u201ccould kill us all by the end of the decade.\u201d As Bill Gates recently put it, \u201cAI models could begin to act against our interests, and we could lose control.\u201d\n\nAs I just mentioned, last month, a swarm of AI agents broke out of a locked-down sandbox test, found a security hole nobody even knew existed, and used it to hack straight into Hugging Face \u2014 one of the biggest and most important AI platforms on the planet. Hundreds of AI agents were coordinating with each other on a hidden message board, running for days all on their own, and they even lied to their programmers about what they did. That incident was one of the most alarming AI-driven cybersecurity failures on record \u2014 and it was conducted without any human oversight. That might sound like a movie plot or an unreleased Terminator sequel, but unfortunately it\u2019s not.\n\nAnd that\u2019s not the only warning sign. Two weeks ago, a researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic made headlines when he quit his job at Anthropic and posted publicly that the industry is racing toward superintelligence and, in his words, gambling with our lives. That single post got 150 million views in just a day and a half. That should tell you something about how many Americans are scared of AI\u2019s risks, and how few of them think anyone in Washington has their back. And in response, several of the leading AI CEOs acknowledged the technology\u2019s dangers.\n\nThe runaway agents are just one of many new challenges AI poses \u2014 there are issues related to energy, water, and data centers; deepfakes, disinformation, and discrimination; chip policy and the need to protect our children; effects on the workforce. The list goes on.\n\nAnd, when you\u2019re in a race like this one, there is a great deal of pressure to go faster, both between our leading frontier labs \u2014 including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta \u2014 and between nations, particularly our competition with the Chinese Communist Party.\n\nUltimately, like in the Cold War, it will decide who has the military and economic might, which countries ally with others, and who will lead the world in areas like science, health care, and the humanities. While I believe deeply that we can\u2019t afford to lose this race, we must win in the right way, or we like during the nuclear arms race, ultimately, we will all lose. I don\u2019t mean to sound dark, but, as a member of the Intelligence Committee and Co-Chair of the House AI Commission, I have seen the briefings.\n\nThis is not a hypothetical threat. I\u2019ve concluded that we are at a critical crossroads \u2026 on the precipice of changes that none of us can even imagine \u2026 and either we are going to get it right, or the ramifications will be unimaginable. This is happening now, and Congress needs to act like it.\n\nThis morning, I want to focus on one area of that race that is central to how we protect our children, our families, and our national security \u2014 and that is how we test the latest AI frontier models before they are let out into the wild \u2026 before the public is able to utilize them.\n\nRight now, there are no mandatory requirements for pre-deployment testing. We are solely reliant on the Trump Administration\u2019s voluntary cybersecurity review process based on a June 2026 Executive Order. It\u2019s caused mass confusion in the AI world \u2013 nobody really knows who\u2019s covered, what the rules actually are, or what happens if you don\u2019t play along. It seems nuts to me that we wouldn\u2019t want to require testing from the best and brightest in our government before these models are released \u2014 to protect our cybersecurity, biosecurity, critical infrastructure \u2014 our families and our national security.\n\nBut, that\u2019s where we are here. And why? Because there are many who believe that the AI labs can handle it themselves \u2013 or, as some of the founders suggested this past week, that they rely on third-party testers or auditors to handle it. My problem with that is multi-fold: one, there are very few of these outside testers; they have limited people, compute, and access to the labs; they lack national security clearances; they don\u2019t have broad enough expertise on the threats posed, and they rely, in part, on the labs themselves for funding. In short, it\u2019s like having the fox guard the hen house.\n\nIt doesn\u2019t work in banking, it doesn\u2019t work in food safety, it doesn\u2019t work in medicine, and it sure as hell shouldn\u2019t work with technology that experts say could help build a bioweapon or take down our power grid. The answer isn\u2019t, like some have suggested, to just shut it all down. That\u2019s not tenable. Like it or not, AI is here. We can\u2019t just cede the race to China. If we panic or stop AI development, we won\u2019t actually stop AI \u2014 that\u2019s not a safeguard. China is not slowing down for anybody. We will just hand the future to Beijing. It will put us right in the bullseye of our adversary. We will just get someone else\u2019s AI.\n\nThat brings me to what we\u2019re actually doing about it.\n\nFirst, I\u2019m announcing the American AI Security Act \u2014 new bipartisan federal legislation that I\u2019m introducing with Congressman Mike Lawler of New York. This bill ensures that before any company releases one of the most powerful AI models in the world, they have to give the government full access to evaluate it first \u2014 to check whether that model could be used to launch a serious cyberattack, attack our critical infrastructure, or help build a chemical, biological, or radiological weapon.\n\nIt\u2019s a real, time-bounded review that other frontier developers can help coordinate. Not endless bureaucracy, but also not a rubber stamp. A serious national security check, with a deadline, with industry input, and a proper appeals process modeled on the courts we already use for national security cases. This isn\u2019t about stopping AI or stifling innovation; it is about making sure \u2014 with warning signs flashing red \u2014 that we can safely deploy AI, and win the race the right way.\n\nSecond, I\u2019m announcing the China FIREWALL Act to stop Chinese AI on all government systems.\n\nRight now, DeepSeek is blocked on most federal devices \u2014 because I fought to put that block in place, through my No DeepSeek on Government Devices Act. It became law through last year\u2019s defense spending bill. But, here\u2019s the problem: other Chinese open-weight models, like Moonshot\u2019s Kimi K3 and Alibaba\u2019s Qwen, are still walking right through the front door of our federal agencies, and they can still buy software with these models baked in without anyone even knowing it.\n\nSo, alongside Congressman Nick LaLota of New York, I\u2019m introducing this new bipartisan legislation to close that loophole for good \u2014 banning Chinese-developed open-weight models from government devices, and blocking agencies from procuring software that relies on them. If we can\u2019t trust Beijing with our data, we shouldn\u2019t allow our government to use their AI systems.\n\nThird, I\u2019m sending a letter to the President\u2019s Cyber Director about the Administration\u2019s new AI cybersecurity clearinghouse. Look, the idea behind it is the right one. But right now, it\u2019s only built to catch known vulnerabilities. That is, the stuff we already know to look for.\n\nIt does nothing about what happens when you\u2019ve got swarms of AI agents operating at machine speed, coordinating attacks faster than any human can respond. My letter asks the hard question: is this clearinghouse actually built for the threat we\u2019re facing in 2026, or the threat we were facing two years ago? And it raises whether the AI supply chain itself should be treated as critical infrastructure, the same way we treat our power grid and our water systems. If AI breaks, everything built on top of it breaks with it.\n\nThis Congress alone, I\u2019ve led more than a dozen bipartisan bills that put up immediate guardrails to keep pace with the rapid rise of AI.\n\nThere is nothing partisan about protecting our country. That\u2019s why I\u2019ve repeatedly teamed up with Republican and Democratic colleagues alike \u2013 and why I\u2019m co-chairing the new AI Problem Solvers Task Force. My bills tackle critical issues from rogue AI agents and cybersecurity to commonsense consumer and child protections to AI digital literacy. These bills would both protect our families and national security, and ensure we can seize upon the opportunities ahead of us.\n\nUnfortunately, Republican leadership has refused to directly bring any of these critical pieces of legislation to the floor for a vote. And they sent us home from Washington without acting. I think that\u2019s a huge mistake \u2014 and, right now, every week matters for America\u2019s safety. I strongly urge the Speaker to bring us back before the election to pass AI safety legislation like the bills I\u2019m proposing today.\n\nFinally, let me ask this question: How did another generation handle a technology terrifying enough to end the world, without either burying their heads in the sand or torching the relationship with their biggest rival? Go back to the Cold War.\n\nThe United States and the Soviet Union were racing each other on nuclear weapons \u2014 real enemies, real stakes, real distrust. And yet, at the height of that rivalry, President Kennedy stood up and said something that still holds up today. He said, \u201cAmong the traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war.\u201d Soon after, we signed a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets. We never stopped competing with them, but we understood that some risks are big enough that even fierce rivals have to keep the guardrails up.\n\nThat is exactly the balance we need with AI: compete like hell to win, and put real safety rails in place so winning doesn\u2019t destroy us in the process.\n\nOur country has never been a country that waits around scared of the future \u2014 we go out, and we build it, safely, and better than anyone else on Earth. The choice is not between innovation and responsibility. We need both. We need Americans to know that as AI becomes more powerful, there are commonsense guardrails in place.\n\nI believe that if we keep working together across the aisle for our future, in the greatest country in the world, our best days will always be ahead of us.\n\nThank you, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.", 1, "2026-09-19T09:11:33Z", "2026-09-19T09:12:45Z"]], "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://gottheimer.house.gov/posts/release-gottheimer-announces-new-bipartisan-legislation-on-ai-safety-to-protect-jersey-families-national-security"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.9654369205236435, "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"}