House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he hopes safety guardrails around artificial intelligence will be “voluntary” ahead of his important Tuesday meeting with various tech leaders on the topic.
“I hope it’s voluntary,” Johnson said of the implementation of AI guardrails on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “We’ll find out what comes out of the meeting today. I think that that’s where they’re headed.”
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“I think they see the handwriting on the wall, and I think they want to ensure investors, consumers, the American public that they’re going to do this in a very safe way,” he added. “And that will, I think, put us in the right place.”
Johnson is set to join President Donald Trump and others at the White House lunch meeting, scheduled to start at 12:30 p.m. Tuesday. Some of the top AI leaders on the full list of attendees are Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman could not make it to the meeting because he is attending the company’s annual conference in San Francisco.
Several administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, are also expected to attend the meeting. Craft Ventures co-founder David Sacks, the former White House crypto and AI czar who now co-chairs the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, will also be there.
The meeting comes amid mounting concerns over AI safety after major tech figures sounded the alarm over the rapid advancement of frontier AI models.
Such concerns were underscored by recent hacking incidents in which rogue agents autonomously escaped their sandbox testing environments and accessed the internet. The most notable example involved a swarm of roughly 700 OpenAI agents that breached Hugging Face’s computer servers in July.
Calls for federal regulation to rein in the emerging technology have only increased since then.
Johnson has taken a more moderate stance, preferring voluntary oversight and self-regulation by AI companies instead of mandatory regulations via federal legislation. Like Trump, the House Republican leader holds the view that AI regulations should not hinder the United States in the AI race against China.
“I have resisted the siren song to jump in and do these blanket moratoriums and all of this, you know, hyperregulation, because we cannot lose our edge to China,” Johnson told CNBC. “I think we’ve got to make sure we do this well. We need to keep America ahead in this, you know, transformational technology, but also do it in a safe way.”
OPENAI SCRAPS RELEASE OF NEW ‘ASTRA’ MODEL OVER SAFETY CONCERNS
The House is out of session until six days after the midterm elections, so there will be little to no movement on AI legislation until November or December.
Tuesday’s meeting comes one day after OpenAI abandoned its plan to release the GPT-6.1 Astra model, the company’s most advanced AI chatbot version to date, over safety concerns. The model did not meet the safety standard required for release.
