Obama pushes Jeffries to move AI oversight to center of agenda: Report

Former President Obama reportedly urged House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) to make AI oversight a central tenet of his caucus’s agenda earlier this week.

Obama told Jeffries at a Thursday fundraiser that Democratic lawmakers should develop a framework for a “public conversation” on the technology if they take back the House, The New York Times (NYT) reported Sunday .

“This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous,” Obama said. “If we do get on top of it, I do think it’s beneficial.

“I genuinely think it’s going to accelerate, for example, drug development in ways that can help us cure diseases. I do think that this can help us figure out pathways for a clean energy future.”

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have expressed alarm at recent warnings from AI researchers on the risks the technology poses.

That includes a Tuesday warning from Jacob Coxon, who resigned from Anthropic and said those building AI models believe the technology “could kill us all” by the end of the decade.

“I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote on social platform X .

During a Sunday interview on ABC’s “This Week,” Jeffries said he supports lawmakers acting “urgently” to regulate AI, saying guardrails on the technology would “protect the health, the safety, the well-being of the American people.”

While speaking to Jeffries on Thursday, Obama did not touch on specific regulations lawmakers should implement on AI, per the NYT. The former president also said he is neither an “accelerationist” nor a “doomer” regarding the technology, the paper reported.

The Hill has reached out to a Jeffries spokesperson for comment.

President Trump said Sunday the U.S. must defeat China in the AI race, reiterating his generally laissez faire approach to the technology.

“We’re the most sophisticated country in the world and frankly, I want to keep it that way.”

Trump added, “We can put guardrails, and we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”