Speaker Johnson rejects an AI moratorium, says Congress won't lead on AI safety rules
Days after Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI's CEOs called for the industry to slow down, House Speaker Mike Johnson told CNN safety is the industry's job to solve, not Congress's -- and proposed a White House sit-down instead.
House Speaker Mike Johnson used a September 13 appearance on CNN's "State of the Union" to rule out federal legislation slowing AI development, telling host Jake Tapper that "we cannot put a moratorium on this because China will overlap us." The interview came days after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's essay calling for the industry to deliberately pace its own capability gains -- an idea Sam Altman and Elon Musk both publicly endorsed within hours -- and after the show opened with a separate clip of Amodei telling CNN governments have the power to regulate AI if they choose to use it.
Industry's job, not Congress's
Tapper pressed Johnson on why Congress hasn't moved given frontier labs' own CEOs are now asking for guardrails. Johnson's answer put the responsibility back on the companies: AI developers, not lawmakers, should be the ones ensuring their products are safe, and Congress shouldn't jump in with an emergency moratorium of its own. His one concrete proposal was procedural rather than legislative -- summoning AI company leaders to a joint sit-down with the White House and Congress to work out safety terms directly, which he told reporters he'd personally push for.
The China argument, and who's pushing back
Johnson's stated rationale is competitive rather than technical: any US slowdown just hands ground to Chinese AI development. It's the same framing the Trump administration has used to argue state AI laws should be preempted rather than multiplied. That argument is contested from more than one direction at once -- Democratic members including Reps. Sam Liccardo, George Whitesides, Lori Trahan and Ted Lieu have pushed Johnson to bring the House back early specifically to pass AI safeguards, while on the right, RNC member and Humans First chairwoman Amy Kremer told Fox News the concern isn't slowing AI down so much as who controls the fallout, arguing states shouldn't lose authority over "the massive data centers being built to power AI."
Johnson didn't commit to a timeline for his proposed White House meeting, leaving the same question CNN opened the segment on -- whether the labs asking for pacing get an answer from government or end up setting the terms themselves -- unresolved for now.