(Economist) Lawrence Lessig and Yoshua Bengio on what Congress can do to prevent an AI catastrophe

For years, AI scientists have been warning that the technologies they are developing are technologies they don’t know how to control. Those concerns were largely ignored in America’s Congress. In 2024 members of California’s delegation in Congress took the extraordinary step of asking Governor Gavin Newsom to veto a then-pending state AI safety bill. The risks, they said, were “hypothetical”. The Terminator, they reminded the governor, was science fiction.

But the invasion of Hugging Face, an AI-development platform, by an OpenAI model earlier this summer has begun to change Washington—and terrify the public. “The truth is,” Representative Ro Khanna tweeted, “for too long, too many of us did not give enough weight to the warnings of AI safety activists…I was one of those many, and I was wrong.” Mr Khanna has now joined an array of members from both parties to propose the FRONTIER Act, an ambitious regulation of the most powerful models, tied to pre-empting state regulation. Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed even more aggressive limits on AI development.

These proposals are good starts. But they are both too much and too little. It is too early to silence state regulators, and not enough to focus on the risks caused by the most powerful models alone. Instead, we need an approach that advances AI safety generally while avoiding the developments AI scientists are most fearful of.

Four changes by Congress would do that and provide time to work through the immensely complicated questions that will follow.

First, it should expressly allow competitors to agree to slow development while safety technology is improved. 

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Lawrence Lessig and Yoshua Bengio suggest how to reduce serious risks without abandoning American technological leadership https://t.co/ZA1TP9vVT7

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) October 13, 2026