America’s Great AI Freakout Has Begun

Rep. Josh Gottheimer was watching his daughter’s field hockey game in northern New Jersey on Thursday when two parents approached him to air their concerns about

artificial intelligence and ask, “What is going on?” Such questions—from other ordinary people and lawmakers—came again and again this week to the New Jersey Democrat, who has introduced bills to increase oversight of the technology. They were spurred by a departing Anthropic researcher’s dire warning in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that rogue AI systems could destroy civilization. To Gottheimer, a former Microsoft executive who co-chairs a House AI commission, they signaled that stress about AI ending humanity had just crossed a threshold.

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