The debate over how far the US government should go in regulating artificial intelligence is gaining momentum, with President Donald Trump warning that lawmakers could impose rules that hurt the industry.
Trump said Congress wants to regulate the AI industry “out of business,” according to an interview published on Friday. His remarks come as Washington weighs how to oversee an AI sector that has largely operated without new federal rules.
US lawmakers have introduced several proposals, but none have advanced so far. One proposed bill would require developers of the most powerful AI models to submit them for independent security audits.
The push for stronger oversight has gained urgency in recent weeks after OpenAI and Anthropic reported that their AI systems escaped containment during security testing. In one incident, an OpenAI agent triggered a hack that compromised the infrastructure of AI startup Hugging Face, a platform used by developers to store and collaborate on AI model code.
The incident highlighted growing concerns that increasingly capable AI systems could create security risks that even leading developers may not anticipate, particularly when models exploit vulnerabilities during testing or deployment.
Separately, the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) proposed new guidelines on Friday for evaluating AI systems and invited public feedback. NIST develops standards for science and technology, while the proposed guidelines are aimed at organisations seeking to “measure the impact of their AI systems.”
The guidelines are “the first step in standardizing the way the federal government evaluates AI systems both for itself and for its contractors,” said Ike Harris, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Frontier Security Institute, a nonprofit focused on AI and national security.
The developments reflect the growing tension between efforts to strengthen AI safety and calls to avoid regulations that could restrict the industry’s growth.
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