Rep. Don Beyer, a Democrat who is seeking a seventh term in Virginia’s 8th Congressional District, is warning that lawmakers should act quickly to maintain control over the growth of artificial intelligence.
“Far too often Congress reacts AFTER a disaster. We must not only be reactive with artificial intelligence, we can’t wait for an AI catastrophe to spur a response,” he wrote on X.
Beyer is the co-chair of the Congressional Artificial Intelligence Caucus. His office told the Daily Signal that the issue is important enough that the House should hold discussions this month, before the official fall recess. “The need is urgent, and I think plenty of my colleagues in both parties agree that this must be a higher priority than the upcoming recess,” Beyer added in his post.
The House was scheduled to host various hearings through Thursday of this week before lawmakers leave Washington to hit the campaign trail. Congress began the month with a busy slate, but the House went into recess for most of last week and may not have time to accomplish much unless lawmakers add more sessions in September.
Leaders in the private sector are also warning about the power that artificial intelligence seems to be developing. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources,” researcher Jacob Coxon wrote on X last week as he resigned from the AI firm Anthropic. “Do not underestimate the power of this technology.”
Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic, also called for the AI industry to slow itself down. “I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence—not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up,” he wrote. “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”
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Beyer said he respects the fact that the industry may be trying to take positive steps, but he thinks the government must be more involved. “While I appreciate the sentiments of private sector leaders expressing a willingness to voluntarily slow down model development, the federal government MUST take the lead here to ensure that the response is fully transparent to the American people, and industry-wide,” he wrote.
For his part, President Donald Trump clearly opposes any attempt at congressional oversight of the high-tech industry.
“Concerning AI, when, in the History of Business did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?” he wrote on social media. “AI, and Data Centers, will be the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History—Bigger than Oil, Gold, Diamonds, or even the Internet.”
He added that he thinks there is “a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China.”
The vice president also weighed in. “Personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them. It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse,” Vance said during a campaign swing. “So, I think we just have to be careful about this.”
Beyer, however, disagrees. “This cannot come just from the Executive Branch, which has failed to be transparent about its proposed AI testing framework. Congress must act and pass AI legislation,” he wrote on X.
Virginia is at the center of the debate around AI because the commonwealth is the worldwide leader in data centers. There are at least 674 data centers in Virginia, with more proposed, including a major one in Botetourt County.
Data centers are the backbone of artificial intelligence, since they store the data and run the servers that make large language models possible. Another Virginia Democrat, Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, will be a co-leader of the new Innovators Caucus, launched this week to shape AI policy.
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