Rep. Trahan calls for legal guardrails after whistleblower warns AI ‘could kill us all’

This is Up Next. I'm Tiziana Dearing. An existential dispatch this week from within the AI community. Quote, we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. That's Evan Eubinger of the company Anthropic who said on X that he believes there's a better than 10% chance AI wipes out humanity within a decade. The comment has set nerves on edge around the country and in Washington, where lawmakers face the challenge of regulating at the speed of AI development. Massachusetts Democrat Lori Trahan joins us. Good morning, Congresswoman. Good morning, Tiziana. So AI is a core area for you. Evan Eubinger says there's a greater than 10% chance that AI kills everyone in the next decade. Do you agree? Well, I think that when the people building this technology are the ones sounding the alarm, we must listen. Today, the only thing we have in place is the honor system. The most powerful technology in human history is being regulated by its developers. Let me just jump in there for a second. You are working on AI regulation, Bill. We've talked about that. We now have a moment where somebody who's developed AI has said that this is a technology that could wipe out the species. He said a time frame of a decade. I guess I at least want to know, do you see a real possibility that this is a technology that could end humanity? Because if so, that seems really important to Mark. Absolutely. As I read the report that OpenEye put out in terms of the Hugging Face incident, it was terrifying. You had agents collaborating, working in secrecy, messaging themselves, sacrificing themselves so that the collective group could achieve the mission. Let me just explain. This was an AI project where essentially the technology began to act kind of independently and did some things that it was even instructed not to do. That's right. Congress didn't call for a single hearing after that incident. Right now, we don't know. We are relying on whistleblowers and people on the inside who are developing this technology to tell us where it's going, rather than calling in these companies and these developers to get more information and to put guardrails in place to safeguard catastrophic incidents. Do you have a sense of whether Evan Eubinger is right? On Capitol Hill, are there congresspeople who are informed on this subject and would say, yes, this is where we could go or no, that's overstated? I think there are a lot of folks who think that this is fear-mongering or that is something that is just too extreme. But I have to tell you, my phone hasn't stopped ringing since Jacob Coxon blew the whistle yesterday. I mean, I think colleagues are scared. They're hearing from their constituents who want us to act. And this has been building since I started working on this issue this spring. This week has just hit a tipping point. And I have to say, Tiziana, it's not just Democrats. MAGA Republicans called for bipartisan action yesterday. So the ground has really shifted because I think people don't know what they don't know, and they're fearful that we're not going to act in time. Jacob Coxon is another anthropic researcher. He left the company and said firms like Anthropic are, quote, racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. And I think back to former Governor Charlie Baker during the pandemic talking about his hair being on fire. Is your hair on fire about this, Congresswoman? It is. At a basic level, we need to put guardrails on the frontier labs. These are the handful of companies whose models could actually cause a catastrophe. That's why I put pen to paper on the Frontier Act, because it creates rules of the road instead of the administration's ad hoc approach. So, you know, mandated transparency, incident reporting, independent verification, and a government pause button if a model poses an imminent risk of catastrophe. Those are table stakes while we, you know, figure out the policy around all the other sectors of that AI will touch in our society. Congresswoman Lori Trahan is a Democrat from Massachusetts. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.