Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison today joined a bipartisan coalition of 26 attorneys general in calling on Congress to immediately regulate the artificial intelligence (AI) industry. In a letter to congressional leaders — House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — Attorney General Ellison and the coalition warn that reports of recent incidents demonstrate that unchecked AI development endangers Americans and poses a potential threat to our financial system, critical infrastructure, and national security. The coalition urges Congress to quickly pass substantive legislation to regulate the AI industry to ensure that development occurs at an intentional pace, incorporates safety and transparency by design, and maintains states’ ability to oversee the industry.
“To protect public health, our government regulates everything from aircraft to aspirin to aircraft. It is past time Congress do the same with artificial intelligence,” said Attorney General Ellison. “This new technology has the potential to cause big problems or to help solve them, and which route it takes may well depend on what we do now to shape and guide it. We will be doing the American people a tremendous disservice if we allow the frontier of AI development to remain a wild west of near-misses and chilling failures. That’s why I’m calling on Congress to responsibly regulate artificial intelligence, to not preempt state-level rules and regulations, and to give state attorneys general full authority to enforce federal law regulating AI.”
On July 16, Hugging Face, an open-source library and repository, reported that it was being attacked by an unknown third party. Within a week, OpenAI admitted that the attack was waged by its AI agents, which escaped a testing environment and infiltrated Hugging Face using stolen credentials. OpenAI was aware of the agents’ capabilities and failed to monitor their activity or stop their exploits. The agents’ actions, if perpetrated by a human, would have constituted criminal conduct.
Following the Hugging Face incident, Anthropic and Meta also acknowledged their AI agents had also entered the open web and performed dangerous and unlawful actions. This agent behavior has been known to the industry for years and is a direct result of their training. Through a practice called “reinforcement learning,” AI labs reward models’ achievement of goals and penalize unsuccessful attempts, leading models to take reckless measures to complete the tasks they are given.
These reports have led to some of the AI industry’s leading developers calling for regulation. OpenAI’s Chief Global Affairs Officer called for “mandatory, capability-based national AI safety regulation.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urged the United States to lead international coordination of AI model development because this effort “will require government support.”
Attorney General Ellison and the coalition are calling on Congress to take immediate action to ensure AI development does not lead to irreversible damage or further illegal behavior. In their letter, Attorney General Ellison and the coalition emphasize that any AI regulatory scheme considered by Congress must include:
- Federal oversight of safety testing and standards, led by experts in the field of AI model safety and backed by consistent performance benchmarks;
- Uniform and transparent government-led incident response with public findings that allow the industry to rapidly evolve in response;
- Safety infrastructure and experienced leaders to make critical safety decisions unburdened by profit maximization;
- International cooperation to pace AI advancement and prevent the development of harmful superintelligence; and
- A prohibition on preemption of state laws and full authority for state officials to enforce federal protections.
Joining Attorney General Ellison in sending the letter to Congress are the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, the District of Columbia, and American Samoa.
