House members are circulating a letter asking Speaker Mike Johnson to call the chamber back immediately and keep it in session until Congress passes legislation on AI safeguards, Axios reported.
The push is described as drawing support from both parties. It follows a week of alarms from researchers inside the leading labs, who have gone public with warnings that increasingly capable systems could escape human control within the decade.
Congress has not coalesced around an answer. Lawmakers are at what Axios called the “concepts of a plan” stage, and leaders have shown little urgency about scheduling votes. A bipartisan bill introduced in July, the Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act, would let labs coordinate on safety work without antitrust exposure. The House version has sat with the Judiciary Committee.
Industry leaders disagree about whether coordination is even workable. OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki argued last weekend that “coordinating to slow down future development” is the best path forward and predicted that voluntary slowdowns become commonplace until shared safety bars exist.
Others read the legal worry as cover. John Schulman, an OpenAI cofounder now chief scientist at Thinking Machines, wrote that antitrust law bars certain agreements but does not stop labs from jointly developing a pacing proposal. Nicholas Felstead, an Australian competition regulator who has written on the question, said a coordinated pause may amount to restricting output and could violate the Sherman Act, while noting that even the uncertainty acts as a deterrent.
