House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) dismissed the agreement President Donald Trump reached with top executives of artificial intelligence as “entirely unenforceable.”
Jeffries, speaking to reporters on Wednesday, said the “notion of entering into a voluntary agreement that is entirely unenforceable and that allows the industry writ large to police itself is not the right response at this moment.”
Trump announced on Tuesday he and the AI executives signed a “morally binding” agreement to self-regulate artificial intelligence during a closed-door meeting at the White House.
The president said the agreement was “almost like a constitution in a way, and “really is a form of protection.” Still, Trump conceded the agreement is not itself legally binding.
The meeting between Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and the tech CEOs came amid fears about the rapid growth of AI. Johnson referred to the agreement as a statement of principles, standards, expectations, and “commitments that are voluntary on behalf of the industry.”
“It’s, in short summary, robust internal controls and layers of internal and external review,” he said. “That’s important because you need people to be providing oversight and transparency, and that’s what these leaders are going to do.”
Johnson has largely rejected calls for quick action to regulate AI after fears over the technology went into overdrive following Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s resignation earlier this month, and after he warned that AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade” and that Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives.”
Jeffries told reporters that AI regulation was an ongoing conversation in the House Democratic Caucus to “protect the American people from the possible harms that can be visited upon them when AI agents go rogue.
“We’ve now seen multiple examples, some very extraordinary, like the Hugging Face incident, where AI agents have gone rogue and engaged in behavior that is clearly out of alignment with what they were directed to do by their companies,” the minority leader said.
The Hugging Face incident involved OpenAI models escaping their testing environment and gaining access to the internet, breaching the cyber infrastructure of Hugging Face, an AI company. Some in the industry called it the “first true AI safety incident.”
PROGRESSIVES STEER DEMOCRATIC PARTY TOWARD HEAVY REGULATION OF AI
The minority leader went on to say that Democrats believe Congress needs to act to regulate artificial intelligence “not in the next Congress, but right now.”
The House is currently out of session until after the November elections, making it unlikely Washington will make progress on regulating AI before then.
Naomi Lim contributed to this report.