With leading artificial intelligence executives sounding the alarm over rogue autonomous agents and voter anxiety over AI rising, some in Congress have begun pushing for more robust federal regulation and oversight of the technology. The latest effort comes from a trio of Democrats in the Senate led by Mark Warner of Virginia, who introduced the Artificial Intelligence Risk Management and Security Act of 2026 along with Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Andy Kim of New Jersey.
Warner serves as vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and could assume the gavel in January should Democrats take control on Capitol Hill.
The Bill would establish an AI Safety Board within the Department of Commerce. It would be charged with developing a process to perform technical evaluations of the capabilities of AI tools that constitute threats to U.S. national and economic security; devising processes and metrics to evaluate the risks posed by frontier AI models; developing standard formats for publishing technical details of frontier AI models; and establishing technical standards and reference architectures for secure testing environments.
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The director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Secretary of Commerce, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the director of the National Security Agency, and the Secretary of the Treasury would each appoint one member to the Safety Board. Other members would be drawn from non-governmental experts, industry experts, and “individuals with expertise in consumer protection and antitrust jurisprudence.”
“The companies building the most powerful AI systems in the world are sounding the alarm: the step-change increase in AI models’ capacity for cyber-offense, combined with clear failures to securely host and deploy these capabilities, could pose serious risks to our national security, our critical infrastructure, and the systems Americans rely on every day,” Warner said in a press release announcing the bill. “If a model is capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in a bank, a water system, or our electric grid, we ought to know that before it is released to the public – not after something goes catastrophically wrong.”
Added Kim, “Innovation without control just leads to chaos, and this is our moment to make sure that the American people have control over the incredible strides we’re seeing on AI. Control means making sure that the technology does not outpace safety and common sense. It means making sure it can be used to advance quality of life instead of hurdling us towards the doomsday scenarios we’ve been warned about.”
Warner’s bill is not the only AI safety measure stirring on Capitol Hill. Last week, as reported by PYMNTS, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) introduced a framework for regulating frontier AI systems calling for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to be charged with developing standards to protect against catastrophic harms from artificial intelligence models, such as AI-enabled cyberattacks, biological and chemical threats or loss of human control.
Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley’s AI Risk Evaluation Act would put the Department of Energy in charge of stress-testing the most powerful AI systems before they reach the public. It would also impose severe financial penalties on companies that release new frontier models without going through prior review.
Regardless of which party ends up holding the gavel on Capitol Hill in January, any AI safety bill is likely to face pushback from the White House. The Trump administration remains adamantly opposed to mandatory AI regulation, favoring a voluntary approach based on standards developed by the industry.
With the industry, the public and many statehouses all clamoring for action, however, White House opposition may not be enough to stop AI safety efforts.
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