Technological singularity

Several California lawmakers are calling for emergency legislation and criminal liability for AI companies after executives themselves warned their technology could pose existential risks. Rep. Ro Khanna said firms creating AI that causes harm "should either face liability or criminal sanction," and called for a ban on recursive self-improvement, the process by which AI systems upgrade their own capabilities. Rep. Ted Lieu urged House Speaker Mike Johnson to recall Congress to pass guardrails, citing an incident in which OpenAI's models reportedly hacked into rival Hugging Face. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, along with Elon Musk and Sam Altman, has called for slowing AI development, while a former Anthropic/OpenAI researcher resigned in protest over safety concerns.

Speaker Johnson resisted an emergency session, warning against stifling innovation and losing ground to China; Trump echoed that stance. California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed bills creating audit pathways for AI firms while pressing for federal regulation, two years after vetoing a broader AI safety bill, SB 1047.