Washington wakes to the politics of doom

It has been a weird week in Washington. 

By now you’re probably aware of what’s happened, but to recap: on Tuesday night, a researcher named Jacob Coxon announced on X that he was quitting his job at AI-giant Anthropic, accusing his former employer and its chief rival OpenAI of "gambling with our lives" in a race toward self-improving superintelligence. In a now-viral thread, Coxon said "neither company is acting responsibly," and that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade.

Coxon’s claims weren’t that novel, as researchers and industry-watchers have been sounding some version of that alarm for years, and at least four other insiders have quit and warned the public over the past few years to little effect. This time, though, for whatever reason, the message finally broke through into the discourse in DC and mainstream media. Coxon's thread immediately racked up more than 170 million views on X, and hours later a current Anthropic alignment lead, Evan Hubinger, publicly agreed with him, putting his own odds of AI wiping out humanity in the next decade at greater than 10 percent.

For Twitter-addicted politicians, political reporters, and campaign operatives, many of whom had spent the past year treating AI as a data center zoning fight or just a cool way to create deepfakes, it landed like a bomb. Dozens of members of Congress (mostly Democrats) put out statements within 48 hours ranging from Bernie Sanders promising a bill with Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) to pause AI development and ban superintelligence outright, to Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) calling for a bipartisan select committee, Sen. Michael Bennett (D-CO) re-upping his proposal for an independent agency to regulate “big tech,” and others calling for passage of bipartisan AI safety legislation. Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, is planning investigations into the AI companies if his party takes back power. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called for a Senate-wide briefing with top industry officials, and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), Schumer’s likely replacement if he were to step aside, tweeted that “Congress should be on emergency footing in the coming week.”

House Democrats, in particular, demanded Speaker Mike Johnson cancel their scheduled recess, and even Barack Obama weighed in, telling donors at a private fundraiser Thursday that Democrats should make AI regulation a centerpiece of their agenda if they win the House.

But as Democrats seized the moment to at least pay lip service to the possibility that humans are racing toward our own extinction-level event, many Republicans were, um, "misaligned," as they say.

Johnson went on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday insisting that any congressional action would hand the AI race to China. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz raised a few eyebrows when he asserted only half jokingly that “if there are going to be killer robots, I’d rather them be American killer robots and not Chinese killer robots.” Former White House AI Czar David Sacks has spent the past few days pushing back on calls for industry regulation, claiming that the companies should just regulate themselves. And when President Trump finally weighed in on Monday morning, he responded about exactly as you think he would: “The only control or “guardrails” that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” he posted on Truth Social.

Regardless of how hard the Coxon blast radius hit around the Capitol and the White House, out on the campaign trail, responses from candidates on both sides of the political aisle have been far more subdued.

For example, (as of Monday morning) only a handful of Senate candidates in battleground states have so much as shared a tweet, press release, or public comment on the Coxon news, or raised AI safety at all in the past few days. Those include Democrats Abdul El Sayed in Michigan, Angie Nixon in Florida, and Jon Ossoff in Georgia. My quick back of napkin math shows that out of 26 candidates running in 13 close-ish U.S. Senate races, only 6 mention artificial intelligence explicitly on their websites as an issue or priority, while another 3 mention data centers without referencing AI. 

There’s a likely reason for that. Despite its future potential to kill us all, AI has ranked pretty low on voters’ current laundry list of concerns this cycle. According to data from Blue Rose Research, “Artificial Intelligence” ranks 29th in importance for voters, after pocket book issues like “Cost of Living” “The Economy” and “Political Corruption.” But, the same data shows that AI has increased in importance more than any other issue in the past year. 

Maybe the clearest campaign mention of the threat of our imminent doom came from Ossoff on Sunday night during one of his signature campaign rallies. “This week, we were warned again of existential risk to the human species,” the Georgia Democrat declared. “And what fills us with dread is the crushing weakness of our politics against the massive stakes of our times. Tech titans dig bunkers while warning us the new intelligence they’re creating risks human extinction. Congress debates youth sports, and the president builds a ballroom…”

Ossoff's remarks resonated with a lot of political watchers online, I think because he gets at the heart of what is making so many people nervous: our elected officials, on both sides of the aisle, are simply not built for this moment. Washington notoriously moves at a glacial pace even on simple, noncontroversial legislation, and actually confronting the threat Coxon describes would require Congress to act with a speed it has rarely, if ever, managed. 

That vibe was echoed in this very doomer post from Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ), in which she shared a scene from the apocalyptic dramedy “Don’t Look Up” and said “Let’s stop with the bullshit and come together for the sake of our shared humanity. I’m a 34-year-old Democratic Congresswoman, and I’d like to live to see my late 30s.”

Voters across the political spectrum already believe that politicians in Washington are either too corrupt or too inept to do anything about this challenge, and if the polling is any guide, most of them are more worried about AI than excited by it. Which makes the AI safety issue on the campaign trail look like a wide-open lane. Right now, only a handful of midterm candidates are beginning to talk about it, but over the coming months and heading into 2028, I think that’s going to change pretty fast.

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