Johnson on AI regulation: ‘We don’t need everybody to panic right now’

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) on Sunday expressed restraint around the idea of artificial intelligence (AI) regulation in the wake of tech leaders pushing for a slowdown in the development.

“If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American. So, we’ve got to have balance. We’ve got to have steady hands at the wheel,” Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”

“But we don’t need everybody to panic right now. We need to handle this new technology like we have others in the past, and make sure we’re doing everything we can, responsibly, to also not smother American innovation. We have to do both things simultaneously,” the House Speaker added later.

On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that AI development must be slowed to give space for the implementation of necessary risk prevention safeguards, with fellow tech moguls Sam Altman and Elon Musk backing him up.

“We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models,” Amodei wrote in a blog post. “Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”

The Anthropic CEO recommended that AI companies quickly undertake measures aimed at “pacing” the development of models and warned of potentially grim consequences if the technology does not have brakes.

“To be clear, pacing does not mean halting model training or technical progress, but ensuring companies take adequate time to align and safeguard their models, and for third party evaluators to confirm this,” Amodei wrote. “Our pacing framework is an attempt to further strengthen our commitment to safety and encourage a race to the top.”

Amodei’s unveiling of the slowdown proposal came in the wake of recent stark warnings from several current and former employees of AI industry leaders about the dangers of the tech.