Sen. Blumenthal urges AI oversight: 'We're on the verge of losing control'
New artificial intelligence products should be subject to some form of "objective review" before their release, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told CNBC on Wednesday.
The senator, who has introduced bipartisan legislation aimed at addressing AI safety risks, stressed that any new regulation should be targeted and sensitive to concerns about stifling global competitiveness.
"I think there is a balance here to be struck," Blumenthal said on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street." "But the point is that right now we're on the verge of losing control completely," he said.
The remarks came as tech industry leaders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI's Sam Altman, have sounded alarms about the major risks of rapidly advancing AI models and called for a slowdown in the technology's development.
President Donald Trump, however, has vehemently pushed back on those fears, calling them a "hoax" and a "scam." His administration argues that beating China in the race to AI dominance is an all-important goal.
Blumenthal, who has emerged as a prominent voice on AI safety, said he also worries that regulation could dull the U.S.'s AI edge.
"We have to remain competitive," he told CNBC.
But "China is understanding that it needs to regulate AI because it could be a threat to their regime," he added.
"Nobody wants a regulatory state. What we want is, in effect, some scrutiny to prevent the autonomous rogue bots out of the sandbox, infiltrating sites without the control of the developers who were responsible for them," Blumenthal said.
The senator said the Food and Drug Administration's model of pharmaceutical regulation is analogous to the AI debate.
"I think we need to delegate some of this responsibility to the experts," he said. "We are hardly experts in Congress on AI, and I think we need to understand our own limitations in this area."
He also warned of the consequences of delayed action.
"We should learn, by the way, from our experience with social media, where the horse is out of the barn, algorithms are driving toxic content at kids, and we're still trying to catch up," he said.
