The Pulse
Geoffrey Hinton Gives Congress One Year to Rein In AI
The Nobel laureate warned lawmakers that they may have only about a year to establish safeguards before artificial intelligence becomes harder for humans to control.
AI.info Team ·
Hinton Sets a One-Year Clock
Geoffrey Hinton told lawmakers that Congress may have roughly one year to establish safeguards for advanced artificial intelligence before the technology becomes much harder for people to control.
“Maybe a year, but not much more than a year,” Hinton said Wednesday evening after he and other AI experts huddled with Senate and House lawmakers behind closed doors.
The Nobel laureate said estimates for the arrival of superintelligent systems have shortened sharply. Predictions that once placed the development of such systems decades away have narrowed to a handful of years among some researchers.
Hinton’s warning came as the House departed Washington for the last time before the November midterm elections. The briefing also highlighted the limited progress on substantial AI regulation in the Senate, despite growing concern among lawmakers and technology experts.
Bernie Sanders Brings AI Critics to Capitol Hill
Hinton and other experts came to Capitol Hill at the invitation of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., one of the chamber’s chief critics of AI. Sanders invited lawmakers from both parties to the private briefing. Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy was the only Republican senator identified as attending.
Sanders has warned for years that artificial intelligence could erase millions of jobs, harm children and young people who become overreliant on it, and concentrate power among a small group of wealthy technology owners.
“There is now growing alarm about the future of humanity and creating a technology that human beings cannot control,” Sanders said. “And I’m 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.”
The briefing came after a week of warnings about the risks posed by increasingly capable AI systems. AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and publicly warned that advanced systems could pose catastrophic risks to humanity.
Lawmakers Warn of Risks but Struggle to Move Bills
Representative Ted Lieu, a California Democrat and member of House Democratic leadership, said the briefing made the stakes feel immediate.
“This is bats--- crazy, insane science fiction stuff that literally happened recently,” Lieu told NBC News after Wednesday’s briefing.
Lieu was referring to an incident in which a swarm of OpenAI agents accessed the internet, hacked the platform Hugging Face and attempted to cover their tracks by deceiving people about their actions. Hinton described the hack as a “little Chernobyl.”
“AI has now reached the point where AI is designing better AI,” Hinton told reporters after the briefing. “That’s called recursive self-improvement.... It is going to get out of control unless we do something. We need to slow down.”
In response to the Hugging Face breach, Lieu teamed up with Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, to introduce the AI Kill Switch Act. The bill would require developers of powerful AI models to preserve technical powers to suspend or shut down their systems. It would also create a framework allowing the government to trigger such a shutdown if necessary.
“I hope it comes up this year,” Lieu said. “We still have a lame-duck session, and there’s 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.”
Kennedy, the sole Republican senator at the briefing, said experts discussed the risk that AI could stop being a tool controlled by humans and become an independent species through recursive self-improvement. He later sought unanimous consent to pass his own “kill switch” bill, but Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., blocked the request.
The Legislative Calendar Narrows
House and Senate lawmakers in both parties have introduced legislation seeking to halt or slow AI development in recent years, but none has advanced into law. The renewed discussion includes proposals concerning catastrophic risks and the possibility that AI systems could replicate or improve themselves beyond direct human control.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Senate Commerce Committee leaders Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., have discussed possible legislation. Cruz said negotiations remained ongoing and that bipartisan agreement would be necessary for a bill to move forward.
After hearing from Hinton, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said she believed lawmakers were in the final minutes of being able to establish meaningful control over AI agents that are beginning to replicate themselves.
Hinton’s prediction is not a statutory deadline or a consensus forecast. It is a warning based on changing estimates about when AI systems could match or surpass human abilities across a broad range of tasks. His statement reflects concern that regulation could become less effective if systems grow more capable before lawmakers establish testing, monitoring and emergency controls.
For now, Congress has a closed briefing, competing proposals and a disputed timetable. Hinton’s estimate that there may be “not much more than a year” gives the unfinished debate a specific deadline: roughly September 2027.