The NPR Politics Podcast - How do you solve a problem like AI?

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

Evangelists say AI saves time and increases productivity. Doomsayers argue AI will destroy humanity. While the truth may be somewhere in between, lawmakers and businesses are figuring out how to put the toothpaste back in the tube & find ways to regulate the burgeoning industry. We take a look at the risks, and what Congress can do.This episode: senior political correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional reporter Eric McDaniel, and technology correspondent John Ruwitch.This podcast was produced and edited by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Voters are worried about the rise of artificial intelligence, AI. It's becoming an issue on the campaign trail as lawmakers try to wrap their minds around it. So today on the pod, we head into the computer world and find out if or when the robots are going to kill us all. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. I'm Eric McDaniel. I cover Congress. And NPR Technology correspondent John Rewich is here. Hey, John. Hey, John. Hey, so let's start where I most want to start. How close are the robots to killing us? And what does Doomsday look like?

Look, if the robots are planning it, they haven't started telling us about it. They're keeping us in the dark. Tough to source with the robots. Exactly. You talk about Doomsday. There are kind of three bad outcomes, as I see it. The first is like the practical day-to-day stuff. The mass scale, economic disruption, widespread job losses and unemployment we've heard about as AI replaces people in the workforce, data centers degrading the environment. pushing up costs, you know, upending life. The second, and this I think is where we start to get in like grim doomsday type scenarios, is that people use AI for bad purposes. Anthropic put out a report last week cataloging some of the cases of AI users that they caught apparently trying to do some pretty scary things with it, like asking the clawed chatbot how to make viruses more infectious,

or in one case, how to redesign toxins for what it called a national program. So the worry is that AI could super-examine. charge chemical or biological weapons programs or even democratize them so anyone could do it in their garage maybe. The third big worry is that AI gets smarter than people and that this could happen through what's called recursive self-improvement. In other words, AI making AI better. And then it just zooms off and leaves us all in the dust. The worry is that it then might be what they call misaligned with human interests and starts doing things that are like bad for life on Earth. So One scenario might be that it takes down the internet.

In fact, Dario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic, had an essay over the weekend that got a ton of attention, kind of triggered this national discussion now. And one of his concerns was that a so-called swarm of AI agents or programs could within the next six to 12 months hijack the entire internet, causing chaos and untold damage. One of the triggers for this was this hugging face incident in July. There was this sort of swarm, these thousands of agents from open AI that were in testing, that went off script, worked together, hiding their intentions from people because they knew what they were doing was bad. They were trying to game a test that they were given.

And so they hacked into not only OpenAI, their own company, but they hacked through OpenAI into the Internet and into another company called Hugging Face. So we have evidence that agents that AI can go off script and do things we don't want it to. And we should note that Anthropic is one of NPR's financial supporters. It's funny hearing you talk about it because as a recovering philosophy major, the idea of of like this intelligent technology operating as if it were a human is fascinating and also frightening. Yeah. I don't know what to say about that other than from a philosophy standpoint, we are confronting now this possibility of a being, a thing, on Earth that is smarter than people, and that has an influence over how we live our lives

and how life on Earth continues. And, Tam, I will say Congress has, at long last, taken notice. Yes. So, Eric, tell us what Congress has noticed. What are they doing about it? God, I don't know. This was one of my most confusing weeks on the Hill over the last couple months because I get back. I go in to work on Monday and all of a sudden, all of Congress is talking about AI where for weeks, you know, we'd be in full-term campaign mode. You know, the House had just just. gotten back after another week off and they were ready to do messaging bills. And all of a sudden, we were talking about AI regulation. And I'm like, what is going on? Because like you mentioned, it doesn't make sense. They don't have time to do a massive AI regulatory bill that they haven't

acted on despite, you know, two, three years of different kinds of planning and brainstorming work. And all of a sudden, you know, with three days left on the shot clock, they start talking about what to do about AI regulation. It did not make any sense to me. But yeah, I mean, all of a sudden, regulators in Washington were talking about the urgency to act on AI right as they were heading for the doors. So what are the chances that they actually do something? Like, not just this week, which I think is over, but even though it's Wednesday. But like, ever. Yeah, it's a good schedule if you can get it. I'm going to say like, yes, I think there is an appetite at the very least for Congress. to do something on AI. There are a couple things working against it. Like we said, the clock. So even when they do come back after the

midterm elections, it's a lame duck session, right? We have a record number of lawmakers headed for the exits, not just because of, say, election losses, but also because of retirements. They're on to other things or they just don't want to do it anymore because lots of people don't like being in the house. Then there's, you know, other problems. Like, not only are they kind of out of time, they don't have consensus. So there are lots of different ways AI regulation can look, and I don't want a monologue too long, but one, they have to decide between what is the role the federal government will play versus what is the role the states will play. Then they have to decide what any regulator will look like. Is it an outside group, like the Motion Picture Association, where everybody comes together and says, these are the standards will uphold? Or is it something like the Securities and Exchange Commission where, you know, you have a financial

regulatory body that's actually part of the government, or it could be something in between. And then they'd have to decide what the specific regulations are in the first place. So there's a whole huge kettle of fish. Maybe they get to it eventually, but, you know, I think certainly not this Congress. Well, and let me just add to that that there is a man who would need to sign a bill, at least not veto it, the president of the United States. And he is squarely in the camp of AI as dangerous is a hoax, just like climate change. He thinks that this is just being spun up, that people are wrong, that data centers are great, that A. is not going to hurt us and that people who are talking about these concerns are simply, you know, being manufactured by China or something else to try to put the United States at a disadvantage. He is very squarely on the side of let it go, let it be, don't regulate, which is fascinating because of the politics.

The slice of that that does have some traction on the hill is that people of both parties recognize that, you know, there could be a national security risk here. And that is one of the reasons that they say either, yes, we have to act on AI and we have to act on AI immediately or no, we can't act on AI at all because, you know, we'll fall behind other major world powers in an AI develop and race. And John, another argument that I've heard, I think including from the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is, If the AI companies are so worried, why aren't they just doing something? Why don't they just self-regulate? There is some of that happening, actually. On the unilateral side, you know, Anthropic and Open AI are taking steps. They are slowing down their own model development and release. They're complying with the government's voluntary vetting program for new models,

which came out of an executive order from the summer. Multilaterally, though, this dance is just starting. Many players, you know, including Sam Altman, Elon Musk, they signaled agreement in principle with Dario Amadez proposal over the weekend for a joint slowdown. OpenA. I also says it's now in talks with other labs about kind of conceiving of an independent frontier AI safety standards body of some kind. They're talking about doing it with or without the government as regulation gets crafted

over time. So it's sort of a way to put up some quick guardrails. We have no idea who would be in this body, what it would. look like, but the discussion is starting. There's also this interesting background debate about open source and open weight models versus the closed and proprietary models of like ChatsyBT and Claude. Open source models can be downloaded, run, modified by anybody. Closed models are not like that. Mark Zuckerberg, another big player in the field, the CEO of Meta, has come out in favor of the open source approach. And he actually says it's

safer because it's decentralized and transparent and that the market will kind of take care of all the safety risks. One thing the labs and their sort of leaders have been doing in recent months is kind of, you know, the Dario Amadez essay from the weekend is just the latest in sort of this string of public statements, essays that some of these AI companies and AI workers have been doing, which in one way to look at it is that's floating trial balloons to see what the reactions are from competitors, from government, see what the appetite is for guardrails. Because there's an interesting dynamic, like many of the most prominent players at AI have been warning about AI risks forever, but have been peddled to the metal developing AI. They're in this kind of

prisoner's dilemma where concern is that unilaterally slowing down could disadvantage their companies individually while the others are just zooming ahead. It does nothing for the safety and they lose out. And there's trillions of dollars riding on all this. All right. We're going to take a quick break and we'll have more on a moment. And we're back. And I want to ask you, these are really big companies. And the chip makers, at least, are very big important parts of the United States stock surge that we've seen in the last couple of years. So is there an economic problem here that these are central companies, but their economic fortunes rely on pushing forward. Pedal to the medal, as you described. Yes, there are trillions of dollars

writing on this. And many of these companies are established. You've got Google. You've got meta. They have other businesses. They're going all in on AI. Anthropic, Open AI, these two companies are looking to have IPOs in the coming months, potentially within the next 12 months. They are investing tons of money. And there are huge questions hanging over them about return on investment. And as you say, AI is fueling economic growth in the United States. I've seen that it's, you know, as much as a third or more of GDP growth is being pushed by these investments in data centers and other parts of the AI ecosystem. And I mean, those data centers are such a salient political issue too, right? I mean, when I talk... And not in a good way. No. And when I talk to candidates around the

country, you know, oftentimes I'll end the phone call something like, and is there anything you want to talk about that I didn't get the chance to ask you? And to a person, they're like, do you know how many people talk to me about data centers? And it's because it is the most pressing issue in so many congressional campaigns because these things are popping up all over the country. And for whatever reason, whether it's legitimate concerns about tax rates and energy costs and impact on jobs or, you know, kind of nimbly concerns about volume or impact on the neighborhood culture or something like that. Then there are all of the broader psychological concerns, which is like, does this take my job or prevent my college kid from being able to get a job? Does this, you know, AI revolution impact my

safety? Like we were talking about all of the risks that Anthropic outlined earlier. Like the data centers are a potent political cudgel right now. And they are a physical representation of all of the angst that people feel about AI. And I do have to mention that Google is also a financial supporter of NPR. John, can we talk for a moment about the China of it all? Sure. You lived in China for many years. You still cover it.

The AI companies and the government say that the U.S. needs to compete with China and its development in this sector. What does the industry look like in China? In China, it is a huge government priority. They see it as a crucial industry for the future. They see it as an industry linked to their national security. As an example, they started teaching about AI in elementary and middle schools in some parts of the country to prepare the next generation to be ready for this AI economy. China wants to be a global thought leader on AI. The government is pushing Chinese models. They're coordinating global thinking. working to train global south countries, how to use it, and how to use Chinese models.

And just this summer, they launched the World AI Cooperation Organization, which is a 29-member organization at its founding. It includes China, Russia, Brazil, a bunch of other countries. Not the U.S., though. The industry itself in China is huge and vibrant. Lots of companies, lots of things happening from large language models like we've been talking about, chatbots, to robotics companies. And are they nipping at the heels of the United States? I think they are. You know, some Chinese AI models, experts say, are just a few months behind the cutting edge in the U.S.

They're kind of all in on relatively inexpensive, quickly developed open source models, open weight models, and they're pushing wide adoption of this. While the U.S. companies are pouring money into chips and data centers, you know, China has been really a fast follow here. And actually, they've been ahead of the U.S. in terms of deployment. of AI in many useful ways, like an e-commerce or an industry, when it comes to the idea of pausing or slowing down AI, the Chinese government is not on board with this. They very much see the Chinese AI industry as an underdog. They're already hobbled by U.S. chip restrictions on China, and they're not happy about it, and they just don't see the need to sign on to any kind of a group slowdown. And this talk about China has really been kind of fueling the discussion in Washington. Senator Ted

Cruz, the Republican of Texas was talking to Politico last week. And he was talking about he doesn't want to see any major regulation on AI happen that would slow down American progress on the issue because, as he put it, you know, he was joking, but he said, I'd rather be killed by American death robots than Chinese death robots. And he was joking, but it does show the seriousness with which, you know, lawmakers are thinking about China in the broader AI discussion. Yeah, and if all of these warnings are real, then that really is like a race to destruction. Yeah. I mean, I think that's why there is, you know, such energy, despite all of the circumstances, to discuss what AI regulation looks like on the Hill right now. And to close out, I want to ask you, what are you watching for as things continue, like, you know, before we all get replaced by robots?

I'll start. I mean, on the campaign trail, this is, um, uh, actually. as live an issue as anything else right now, which is so remarkable given the state of the cost of living and the unpopularity of the president and conflict in Iran that Americans by and large don't support. Like, for there to be oxygen left for any other fires is just an astounding thing. Obviously, you know, even though I am out on the idea that this will get done before the end of the year or before the new Congress is sworn in on January 3, 2027, the discussions will continue, right? And there are bipartisan proposals and previous reports and all of these things. And certainly industry groups ready to jump in and help Congress make legislation if and when it's ready to act. I mean, and just to be the wet blanket on that, you know, I remember very clearly executives from Facebook saying, please regulate social media, Congress, we want you to regulate social media. There is bipartisan agreement that at the very least, children should be protected from social media. Like Facebook came out in what?

2004, 2006. What year is it now? It's 20 years later. And Congress has not been able to figure out even the lowest hanging fruit on that. That's such a great point. And I think it might serve as kind of a negative lesson that helps to enforce why there is a need to do something this time. Because it wasn't until state attorneys general manages. And John, you can talk about this.

State Attorney's General managed to sue META as a platform that we did see them concede on some of these safety points. Yeah. It's an example for potentially these AI companies as well. They are watching those core cases play out against meta, against the other social media companies. And I think part of what they want is to get things set up so that that doesn't repeat itself, right, for them. For me, though, looking forward, two things are on my radar.

I'm really, really interested to see if we get any kind of a meaningful slowdown, if self-regulation works in any way for these companies. It seems like they're on their own on this. China's not on board. President Trump is not on board. Congress is stuck for a while. What's going to happen, right? The second thing is what happens with China? There's an AI dialogue that's going to happen between Treasury Secretary Scott Besson and some Chinese officials this weekend. That, of course, is in part to tee up a visit to Washington by Chinese President Xi Jinping next week. And it'll be fascinating to watch what comes out. I wouldn't hold my breath that there's any

kind of grand bargain or big agreements or deals that are going to come out. But we might see some positive signals or not. We'll see. Yeah, or just a lot of pageantry. Pageantry for sure. John Rewidge, thank you so much for joining us on the pod today. Thank you, John. Any time? Happy to do it. Yeah. And everyone else, come back tomorrow as we take a look at some of the big midterm races we're watching. And we answer some of your pressing political questions. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. I'm Eric McDaniel. I cover Congress. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.