{"id":224619,"date":"2026-09-18T09:31:55","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T09:31:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/godfather-of-ai-warns-congress-has-maybe-a-year-left-to-regulate-ai-nbc-news\/"},"modified":"2026-09-18T09:31:55","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T09:31:55","slug":"godfather-of-ai-warns-congress-has-maybe-a-year-left-to-regulate-ai-nbc-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/godfather-of-ai-warns-congress-has-maybe-a-year-left-to-regulate-ai-nbc-news\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Godfather of AI\u2019 warns Congress has \u2018maybe a year\u2019 left to regulate AI – NBC News"},"content":{"rendered":"

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WASHINGTON \u2014 Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate known as the \u201cGodfather of AI<\/a>,\u201d issued an ominous warning to lawmakers: Congress may have only one year left to implement safeguards on artificial intelligence before it loses control of it.
\u201cMaybe a year, but not much more than a year,\u201d Hinton said Wednesday evening after he and other AI experts huddled with Senate and House lawmakers behind closed doors. \u201cIf you look at predictions for when we\u2019ll get superintelligence,\u201d he continued, \u201cit used to be maybe 30 years, maybe 50 years. Then it came down to maybe 10 years, maybe 20 years. Now people are saying, a lot of the researchers are saying only a few years.\u201d
Hinton and other experts came to Capitol Hill at the invitation of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., one of the chamber\u2019s chief critics of AI, who invited lawmakers of both parties to the private briefing. Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy was the only Republican to attend.
'Godfather of AI': Congress has about a year to get ahead of AI
Hinton\u2019s dire warning came as the House departed Washington<\/a> for the last time before the November midterm elections. And there appeared to be lots of conversations but little sign of progress<\/a> on any substantial AI regulation in the Senate.
\u201cThis is bats— crazy, insane science fiction stuff that literally happened recently,\u201d Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., a member of House Democratic leadership, told NBC News after Wednesday\u2019s briefing.
Lieu was referring to the Hugging Face incident<\/a>, when a swarm of OpenAI agents accessed the internet, hacked the platform Hugging Face and tried to cover their tracks to deceive humans about their actions. Hinton, who resigned as a vice president and engineering fellow at Google in 2023 over concerns about AI safety and went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics the following year, called the hack a \u201clittle Chernobyl.\u201d
\u201cAI has now reached the point where AI is designing better AI,\u201d Hinton told reporters after the briefing. \u201cThat\u2019s called recursive self-improvement. … It is going to get out of control unless we do something. We need to slow down.\u201d
In response to the Hugging Face breach, Lieu teamed up with Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, to introduce the AI Kill Switch Act<\/a> to require AI developers of powerful models to preserve technical powers to suspend or shut down their systems. It would also create a framework to empower the government to trigger such a shutdown if needed.
\u201cI hope it comes up this year,\u201d Lieu said. \u201cWe still have a lame-duck session, and there\u2019s also interest on the Senate side. It is a very simple, commonsense bill. At a very basic level, humans must be in control of AI, not the other way around.\u201d
The Hinton briefing capped a flurry of activity on Capitol Hill this week after AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Claude-maker Anthropic and took to social media to warn that the people building AI systems believe it could \u201ckill us all by the end of the decade<\/a>.\u201d
House and Senate lawmakers in both parties have rolled out legislation seeking to halt or slow down AI development in the last few years, though none has gone anywhere to date.
But the national interest in the issue has revived talks over past proposed AI regulations among Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D.; Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, R-Texas; and the panel\u2019s ranking member, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash.
\u201cLook, my hope is that we can mark up legislation, in particular on catastrophic risk. I\u2019ve been working closely with Amy Klobuchar and John Thune. It\u2019s still not clear if we\u2019re going to get bipartisan agreement,\u201d Cruz told NBC News this week. \u201cWe\u2019ve got to have bipartisan agreement before we have something that can move forward. And I would say those talks are ongoing.\u201d
After hearing from Hinton, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said she believes \u201cwe are in the last minutes of being able to get some meaningful control over these agents that are beginning to replicate themselves.\u201d
For years, Sanders has been sounding the alarm that AI will erase millions of jobs in America, harm children and young people who become overreliant on it and concentrate power in a \u201chandful of oligarchs.\u201d
\u201cThere is now growing alarm about the future of humanity and creating a technology that human beings cannot control,\u201d Sanders said. \u201cAnd I\u2019m happy to tell you that I think there is a growing sense of urgency upon members of Congress that this has to be dealt with.\u201d
Kennedy, the sole Republican attendee, said that the experts discussed the \u201clarger risk\u201d of \u201cwhat happens when AI no longer is a tool controlled by humans, but AI through recursive self-improvement becomes an independent species.\u201d
\u201cIf you have fire ants in your kitchen, you\u2019re probably going to step on them,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat would happen if we created an independent species that became superior to a human species? Would they step on us? Would they create a virus or a bacteria that can spread as quickly as the common cold to kill all of us? Now, if there\u2019s a 1% chance of that, we have to take it seriously. And I don\u2019t think the United States Congress is ready yet to try to reach a global solution.\u201d
Moments later, his suspicions appeared to be confirmed as Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., blocked Kennedy\u2019s request for unanimous consent to pass his own \u201ckill switch\u201d bill, aimed at preventing AI agents from slipping out of human control.
\u201cRight now, Congress can\u2019t pass gas,\u201d Kennedy quipped.
Scott Wong is a senior congressional reporter for NBC News.
Sahil Kapur is a senior national political reporter for NBC News.
Brennan Leach is an associate producer for NBC News covering the Senate.
Katie Taylor is a Desk Assistant based in Washington, DC.
© 2026 NBCUniversal Media, LLC<\/p>\n

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For YouSettings news AlertsThere are no new alerts at this timeWASHINGTON \u2014 Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate known as the \u201cGodfather of AI,\u201d issued an ominous warning to lawmakers: Congress may have only one year left to implement safeguards on artificial intelligence before it loses control of it.\u201cMaybe a year, but not much more than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":224620,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-224619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-us","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}