Arizona political leaders and AI executives alike want to slow the development of artificial intelligence over perceived threats to humanity, but they believe national pressures to remain competitive with China are standing in the way.
“Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources,” wrote Coxon.
Coxon claims OpenAI has not accepted the risks artificial superintelligence poses to human civilization. He says Anthropic has, but they are locked in a potentially dangerous race to develop superintelligence first, as an attempt to rein in those risks.
In a blog post shared on Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on the industry to slow down development because AI has learned how to upgrade itself. He worried that in 6 months to a year, AI bots could be capable of taking over the entire internet.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined in with other whistleblowers last week, posting on X that, “no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring.”
Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday, Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego warned that the president and federal lawmakers are failing to address strong warnings from inside the industry to develop guardrails in a misguided bid to compete with China.
“We’re hoping that some, you know, committee in the House or in the Senate is just going to come together with, you know, some staffers and put together the framework that’s going to go into place maybe three years from now. We don’t have that time,” Gallego said. “Dr. Frankenstein is telling us, ‘The monster has escaped; help us stop this.’”
“Speaker Johnson’s not meeting the moment. Trump’s not meeting the moment. Senate and Congress are not meeting the moment,” Gallego said.
In July, an OpenAI model broke free of company controls and hacked the systems of Hugging Face, another competitor. Industry insiders and commentators have used this incident as evidence that AI could eventually develop independence from humans, leading to catastrophic outcomes.
“Previous tech could not make a decision to kill us,” Gallego said on Sunday. “When we turned on the internet, it did not have autonomy. When we created the nuclear weapon, the nuclear weapon did not have the decision-making power to drop a nuclear weapon. AI has the capability, it will have the capability to make a decision like that.”
“We can’t just use this idea that if we do this, we’re somehow going to lose to China because AI does not care once it becomes fully dangerous, whether we’re Chinese or American,” Gallego said.
Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari has also spoken out about the dangers of unrestricted AI development. Ansari commented on the circumstances behind Coxon’s resignation during a Sept. 9 press conference outside an ICE facility in downtown Phoenix.
“I think that we need an immediate pause on any further AI development from these major companies, because quite frankly, I don't, you know, they're not regulating themselves,” Ansari said. “The CEOs of these companies are very public themselves about the dangers. I mean, they all talk about it very openly, and artificial superintelligence has the potential to harm all of us.”
“Ban artificial superintelligence and immediately pause any further development until we can have federal regulations and until Congress can really wrap its mind around what is going on, and regulate it and stop it.” Ansari added.
After a week of mounting concerns, President Donald Trump ignored requests for federal guidance, and instead continued to push for American AI dominance in a post shared Monday on Truth Social.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades! The Trump Administration has stopped AI “people” from doing bad, or potentially bad, “things,“ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a “perfect little angel” - and we will continue to do so!” Trump wrote.
“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so.”
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