Congress Has Proposed Many Bills for A.I. Regulation. Lawmakers Have Enacted Few.

Even as some in Silicon Valley clamor for new regulation targeting artificial intelligence, their urgent warnings have failed to inspire action in Washington, where there are many ideas on Capitol Hill — yet seemingly little consensus to act on them.

Over the past two years, Democrats and Republicans in Congress have issued a battery of measures that would slow down A.I. development in response to safety concerns, limit access to the technology to address national security risks and tend to the potential economic fallout from mass automation.

But lawmakers have largely failed to enact any of the proposals, having been stymied by persistent partisan divisions and, in some cases, fierce lobbying by the tech industry.

The consequences of inaction have become starkly apparent, as top executives and engineers at Anthropic and OpenAI begin to call for a global slowdown in A.I. development to steel the U.S. economy against the safety risks. Those warnings include what some say is a threat to civilization itself, if rogue, autonomous A.I. agents gained the ability to bypass constraints imposed by its human makers, or if A.I. facilitated the creation of dangerous new cyberattacks or bioweapons.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/15/us/politics/congress-ai-regulation-bills.html