Reporter’s Notebook: Congress meets AI as fears of human extinction jolt Capitol Hill

Members of Congress returned to Capitol Hill this week in pure freakout mode.

There are apocalyptic scenarios about AI seizing control of water systems.

Subways.

Air traffic control.

Crashing planes.

Firing nuclear weapons.

Even sending Prince Harry and Meghan Markle back to the United States.

But seriously, there’s real fear that Congress may be running behind on regulating AI.

And there are concerns that AI might be developing at such a rapid clip that it’s too late to harness the technology.

Suspicion about data centers has long percolated among voters.

Then former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon declared that AI could extinguish humankind within a decade.

This came after a swarm of OpenAI agents independently "escaped" isolation – then leveraged security vulnerabilities to hack the artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face.

The AI agents weren’t supposed to be capable of any of that.

Researchers say they even used covert methods to communicate with each other via a special language.