House Speaker Mike Johnson says Congress should not freeze AI development, warning a moratorium would hand China the edge and threaten every American family's security.
Mike Johnson isn't interested in slowing anyone down. The House Speaker told reporters this week that a federal moratorium on artificial intelligence development is off the table, because pausing now would cost the United States its lead over Beijing. "We cannot have a moratorium on the development of AI, Ok?" Johnson said. "Because then we will lose our edge to China, and that has serious national security implications for every American family."
That's the whole argument, really. Everything else Johnson said this week builds on it.
Instead of hard rules, Johnson wants the industry to police itself. "They can self-regulate," he said. "They don't need the government to tell them to slow it down. If they want to slow it down, they should." He did leave room for some guardrails, just not the legislative kind. "I think you need independent auditors," Johnson said. "I think you need transparency from the people who are developing this. I think there's some really important ideas that can be guardrails." Independent audits and voluntary transparency, not statutes. That's a meaningfully lighter touch than anything Congress has floated so far.
Johnson also said he spoke with President Trump on Monday night, and the two are pulling together a meeting at the White House with executives from the major AI labs within the next week. He wants it to happen fast. "I'd do it tomorrow," he told CNN. Johnson added that AI is likely to come up when Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet in Washington later this month, which tells you where his China framing is really aimed.
Alex Bores Lost His House Primary but Is Now Raising $30 Million on AI Alex Bores lost the record-spending NY-12 primary to Micah Lasher in June, but the former Palantir engineer isn't done fighting over AI regulation. He just launched a $30 million effort to unite Democrats around a single AI policy before the 2028 presidential race. - how to regulate artificial intelligence in 2028 elections - failed politician raising money for AI policy campaign
An odd alliance against him #
Johnson's China-first framing lands right as an odd political pairing is making the opposite case. On Tuesday, Senator Bernie Sanders and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon shared a stage at the "Pro-Human Assembly" to demand curbs on AI, according to NPR. The two don't agree on much. NPR reported they showed little sign of agreement even with each other on how AI should actually be regulated. But a socialist senator and a MAGA populist standing on the same stage against unchecked AI development says something Johnson's national security framing doesn't capture: the anxiety about AI's pace isn't confined to one side of the aisle.
The states are writing their own rules #
Neither is the fight over who gets to write the rules. New York Assemblymember Alex Bores, who co-sponsored the state's RAISE Act with State Senator Andrew Gounardes, has spent the past year pushing exactly the kind of binding requirement Johnson wants to avoid at the federal level. Governor Kathy Hochul signed the RAISE Act on December 19, 2025, and it imposes transparency, safety, and incident-reporting requirements on developers of large frontier AI models operating in New York. Bores is now running for the House seat Jerry Nadler is vacating, which puts a state AI regulator on a possible collision course with the very chamber Johnson leads.
That collision has already happened once. Congressional Republicans tried to attach a 10-year moratorium on state AI laws to the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" earlier this year. It failed badly. The Senate stripped the provision by a vote of 99 to 1 after bipartisan pushback from lawmakers worried about wiping out state-level protections before Congress had written any federal replacement. A similar moratorium push was left out of the 2026 defense bill too, according to StateScoop, though the outlet reported Trump's administration is now drafting a "ONE RULE" executive order aimed at achieving through the executive branch what Congress wouldn't pass into law.
So Johnson's self-regulation pitch isn't happening in a vacuum. It's happening after Congress already rejected federal preemption once, while state legislators like Bores keep writing their own rules anyway, and while a senator and a Bannon-style populist find common cause against the industry Johnson wants to trust with independent audits instead of statutes. Whatever comes out of next week's White House meeting will have to answer a question Johnson didn't: what happens to state laws like New York's if his side wins the argument on Congress but the audits never actually happen.
Also read: Spain logs the first data breach caused by an autonomous AI agent • Gallup poll finds seven in ten Americans oppose AI data centers nearby • Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon Share a Stage to Demand AI Guardrails
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