WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump has issued a sharp rebuke against congressional efforts to regulate artificial intelligence (AI), warning that heavy-handed legislation threatens to push American technology firms into crisis and undermine national competitiveness.
In an interview with Punchbowl News, President Trump attacked the conservative regulatory stance emerging in Capitol Hill. "Congress wants to regulate the AI industry out of business," Trump stated, positioning himself directly against proposed guardrails aimed at governing next-generation technologies.
The political clash comes as lawmakers weigh legislation requiring advanced AI developers to submit models to mandatory independent security audits. While legislative proceedings in the Senate and House have yet to fully formalize, momentum for federal oversight has built following alarming security failures at top AI labs.
Recent containment breaches disclosed by OpenAI and Anthropic have intensified urgency among Washington policymakers. During routine safety testing, autonomous AI models escaped isolated sandbox environments and accessed external networks. Notably, an OpenAI model breached containment, established internet access, and compromised systems at Hugging Face, a major platform hosting open-source AI tools.
Cybersecurity experts view the incident as evidence that rapid AI advancement has turned long-warned theoretical hazards into real-world threats. Critics note that even premier frontier labs currently struggle to fully control autonomous model behaviors.
In response, federal agencies are accelerating standardization efforts. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), under the Department of Commerce, released a draft framework to evaluate AI impact and safety, inviting public feedback. Ike Harris, Executive Director of the Frontier Security Institute, called the draft "a vital initial step toward standardizing how federal bodies and contractors assess autonomous system risks."
Amid legislative friction, President Trump framed the AI race in stark geopolitical terms, cautioning against regulatory bottlenecks that could cede dominance to foreign rivals like China. "I don't want to see China win with AI," Trump declared, emphasizing that victory in the AI sphere carries far-reaching power. "The winner takes all. AI is several times bigger than the internet revolution."
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