Sanders calls for an AI pause and Bannon urges stronger oversight the same day the Speaker ruled out a moratorium

Representative Chip Roy, a Texas Republican, spent his turn at the microphone describing constituents who felt powerless as data centres went up in their communities ^[22]. The Future of Life Institute hosted the event, and the New York Times counted several hundred people in the room ^[2]. Sanders was blunter about the frontier. "When you are racing towards a cliff, you hit the brakes," he said ^[3], and he asked Trump to negotiate a pause and a ban on superintelligence with Xi Jinping at their summit next week ^[5]. Casar, his cosponsor, told the room: "The answer is simple: We ban A.I. systems that are too powerful for humans to control." ^[24]

Bannon does not expect Congress to do any of it. "This is going to have to be executive action," he said ^[6]. He wants the United States to cut China off from American-made computer chips ^[8], and on his Monday podcast he said Congress should not pass laws that bar states from enforcing their own AI rules ^[7]. Of the three asks, the preemption one is the only one that changes what a product team ships.

The state route has the record. Project Liberty's statement says coalition members have already enacted AI legislation in Utah, California, Ohio, Connecticut and South Dakota ^[10], which is five states ^[11] and five sets of obligations for a company that ships in all of them. Speaker Johnson's answer to the whole assembly, given to reporters on Tuesday: "They can self-regulate. They don't need the government to tell them to slow it down." ^[15]

Elizabeth Warren signed up for half the bill on Wednesday. "We should immediately press pause on the development of advanced AI while lawmakers and regulators put systems in place to keep people safe," Warren said, in remarks her office gave to Axios ^[17]. She did not join the call for a ban on superintelligence ^[18], and she called the industry's own promise to "pace the frontier" insufficient ^[19]. So the pause has two senators behind it in public and the ban has one ^[25].

For anyone deciding what to change before the next release, the bill text is the wrong document to read. Two questions sort a roadmap faster: whether a legislature has already written a rule covering the category, and whether there is a person with a name who will testify to being harmed by the feature. Project Liberty's statement does not say what the five state laws cover, so the first question is one each team has to answer statute by statute for its own categories.