Sen. Ruben Gallego calls for oversight on AI, says Trump administration ‘not meeting the moment’

Sen. Ruben Gallego called for oversight of artificial intelligence and called out President Donald Trump’s administration for “not meeting the moment” during his appearance on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.

“This isn’t previous tech. Previous tech could not make a decision to kill us, right? When we turned on the internet, it did not have autonomy, right?” Gallego told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “Speaker (Mike) Johnson is not meeting the moment. Trump is not meeting the moment. Senators in Congress are not meeting the moment.”

The Arizona senator continued about the evolution of AI and why he feels there needs to be steps taken to regulate it.

“When we created a nuclear weapon, the nuclear weapon did not have the decision-making power to drop a nuclear weapon,” Gallego said. “AI has the capability and will have the capability to make decisions like that. This is more akin to Dr. Frankenstein telling us, ‘The monster is loose. Help me stop the monster.’

“We need to get together as fast as possible with the smartest people, with the skeptics, with the people that want to regulate — the people that want to actually deal with this (and) people that are going to figure out how to actually have the perfect balance.”

Gallego added the U.S. has to adjust its philosophy in handling AI as well.

“We can’t just use this idea that if we do this, we’re somehow going to lose to China. Because AI does not care, once it becomes fully dangerous, whether we’re Chinese or American,” he said. “That’s the danger of this.

“Everyone’s thinking about this in a way that is based on old tech and not what’s going towards the future, and this is why we need to get the people in the room.”

Gallego isn’t alone in wanting oversight of AI as the chief executive of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, Dario Amodei, recently called for its slowdown as well.

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