When Washington talks about artificial intelligence, the conversation is about chatbots, deepfakes, and misinformation. Those debates matter. But while policymakers are still focused on what AI can say, the technology has transitioned into its next phase.
We are now entering the age of agentic AI, and Congress is not ready.
Agentic AI goes a step further than the traditional generative tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Rather than simply responding to prompts, these agentic systems have the capability to pursue goals, manage logistics, and execute workflows with minimal human oversight.
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It’s an exciting new frontier in the AI revolution. Agentic AI has the potential to transform business, innovation, and research, which would drive economic growth, reduce business and consumer costs, and give the United States a major leg up in global competition. It’s a frontier that we need to lead on.
But leading means recognizing that once software begins acting, rather than generating, the rules become more complicated.
If left unchecked, agentic AI could rapidly become the Wild West, yielding serious questions about liability, accountability, and responsibility. Questions like: What happens when an AI agent makes a decision that causes financial harm? What happens when an autonomous system violates a contract, accesses data improperly, creates operational failures, or causes damages that nobody can easily explain? Who is responsible when decisions are delegated to software?
Right now, our answers are incomplete.
That is why Congress has to get in the game — not to create a burdensome regulatory regime but because the uncertainty about agentic AI is a risk. The risk is not the technology itself but rather the lack of clarity for innovators, businesses, and consumers. The reality is this: Businesses don’t invest when legal obligations are unclear. Consumers don’t adopt technologies they do not trust. Innovators struggle to develop when the rules are uncertain.
If Congress sits back and leaves the market to sort it out on its own, we open the door for courts, regulators, and fragmented state laws to define the future by default. On the other hand, if the government overreaches with sweeping bureaucracies, we choke off the innovation we are trying to lead.
America certainly does not need a new alphabet agency to micromanage AI. But we also can’t pretend that legal frameworks built for earlier eras of technology will automatically cover all the questions raised by agentic AI.
The better approach is for Congress to do what it does best: oversight. Long before it writes a single new law, Congress’s job is to watch, ask hard questions, and understand. That means using its oversight tools to examine what our existing laws already cover, how the courts and regulators are approaching these questions, and what standards the industry is developing to answer them.
Congress should watch closely as companies deploy autonomous systems with access to customer data, financial systems, contracts, code, or critical operations. This allows us to understand how questions of permission, oversight, auditability, and accountability are being answered, and whether the answers taking shape are the right ones.
Certainty is what allows innovation to scale. It gives businesses the confidence to invest, consumers the trust to adopt, and innovators the room to move without navigating conflicting state laws or years of litigation.
Our approach to agentic AI should be no different.
To get there, Congress needs to bring together innovators, legal experts, and industry leaders now to shape our understanding of when and how to act, instead of writing premature rules for a technology that is still taking shape.
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America should not fear the future of AI. We should lead it.
But leadership requires more than celebrating innovation. It means working alongside industry leaders to tackle the hard questions before the courts, regulators, and foreign competitors answer them for us.
Rep. Lance Gooden (R) represents Texas’s 5th District and is a senior member of the House judiciary committee.