House Speaker Mike Johnson dismisses calls for hasty AI regulation

House Speaker Mike Johnson said that the media is having an overblown reaction to warnings about AI despite some calls to regulate the industry.

Johnson gave his weekly press conference on Tuesday ahead of the last week of votes before the House of Representatives breaks to go on the campaign trail.

Reporters asked him about whether Congress needed to take action to regulate AI after many people in the industry called for it to be regularly. It comes as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon are hosting a summit around AI on Tuesday.

But the speaker sided with President Donald Trump, who has said that he should be the only guardrail.

“If Bernie Sanders is in charge of this thing, he'll just shut it all down, and we're toast,” he told reporters. Johnson repeated a commonly-parroted line that if the United States reins in AI too much, then China and Xi Jinping will lead the race for the industry.

“We're not going to take stupid, knee-jerk reaction prescriptions on this,” he said. “We're going to do this right, wisely, carefully to make sure that we maintain our edge.”

Trump and most Republicans have largely promoted AI. He brought on David Sacks, the tech investor, to be the chairman of his council of advisors on science and technology.