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We now know the makeup of Congress for what may turn out to be the two most important years in AI’s development. Democrats won big and AI was maybe the fourth or fifth biggest driver of the backlash.
So is strong and smart AI legislation finally on the way? Not yet, says host Rob Wiblin. Overriding a presidential veto takes 67 votes in the Senate and 290 in the House, and support for tough rules isn’t at that level today.
But there are several ways Congress can make progress right away:
- Passing measures already popular in both parties, like requiring companies to secure their model weights against theft, restoring chip export controls on China, and protecting AI whistleblowers
- Using must-pass funding bills to build out CAISSI, the likely home of US AI regulation. It runs on about $15 million a year, while the UK, adjusted for the size of its economy, spends something like 50 times as much
- Holding hearings where company staff answer under oath: What’s Anthropic’s safety case? How big are your biggest models now? Which safety results were too embarrassing to publish?
Still, Rob thinks none of that will be enough.
Meaningfully slowing the AI race while models are around human level will probably take another warning shot at least as shocking as the Hugging Face hacks.
When that moment comes, what gets done will depend on the ideas lying around, so the time to carefully think through proposals is now. The ideas Rob is most keen on:
- Making ‘ban superintelligence’ workable by requiring companies to spend a minimum share of their compute serving customers — creating a dial a regulator could turn up or down
- Throttling recursive self-improvement by only letting companies internally use models that finished training at least six months ago
- Banning models that can do too much without writing anything down in their chain of thought
- Placing government auditors inside the companies
- Letting companies quickly overturn clearly political decisions in court
- Leaving state AI laws in place rather than preempting them
Rob also explains why halting data centre construction — probably the most popular demand of all — is a useful step but not enough by itself, and why people who understand how frontier models get trained are so badly needed for this work.
This episode was recorded on November 6, 2026.
Learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/congress-ai
Chapters:
- The Congress that could decide AI (00:00)
- Legislating AI will still be difficult (00:49)
- Four things Congress can do immediately (01:59)
- Why workarounds won’t be enough (04:25)
- Preparing for future warning shots (05:44)
- Why preparation matters (06:35)
- The slogan will be ‘ban superintelligence’ (07:28)
- Limit recursive self-improvement (08:58)
- Enforce monitorability (11:11)
- Is it useful to stop data centres? (12:12)
- The government needs visibility (13:32)
- We need more AI experts in CAISSI (14:37)
- Checks and balances (16:06)
- Don’t stop the states (17:12)
- Have good ideas lying around (17:46)
Our production team includes:
- Video editors: Josh Alward, Dominic Armstrong, Jasper Luithlen, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
- Producers: Elizabeth Cox and Nick Stockton
- Coordination and support: Katy Moore and Lou Moran
- Camera operator: Dominic Armstrong
