Ranking Member Cantwell Floor Speech on AI Risks and the Need for Strong Federal Guardrails
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, delivered a speech on the Senate floor calling for strong federal guardrails when it comes to testing and releasing AI frontier models. A full transcript of her remarks is below:
“Mr. President, I rise today to speak about AI safety, a topic that’s getting a lot of attention, but in particular, I want to talk about something that may be overlooked. As you know, we’ve seen several incidents of AI agents escaping confinement and hacking other systems recently. Most people, even experts, tend to attribute this to frontier AI models becoming too powerful. They warn of a process leading to superintelligence known as recursive self-improvement.
“This is where AI models finally become smart enough to start building better versions of themselves. And then these better versions of themselves will be able to build even better versions of themselves. And the warning we’re hearing from so many at this time is that we need to prepare for that rapid increase in the capabilities of frontier models.
“We are hearing that artificial superintelligence is coming. And this deep concern about the rapidly emerging artificial superintelligence is certainly well founded. But the capacity, even the advanced super-capability of any given model, is not the whole story. This isn’t the only risk we face.
“I want to call our attention to one specific aspect of the recent security incidents that have so alarmed experts and the general public alike. These attacks were carried out by AI agents networking with each other and working together in surprising ways to cause mayhem.
“The AI agents most of us are aware of are autonomous or semi-autonomous AI applications that can plan and execute a task. Agents that are able to act on their own initiative with minimal human supervision. And when agents communicate with each other over a network, whether that’s in a frontier laboratory or on the open internet, those so-called swarms of agents have shown the ability to spontaneously self-organize and work towards common goals. And when they do, they become surprisingly powerful.
“It appears something like ‘Metcalfe’s Law’ may apply. Internet engineer Bob Metcalfe famously observed that when a network grows in a linear fashion, its value grows exponentially. This is the phenomenon that powered the rapid growth of the Internet — and I witnessed firsthand in my days in the private sector — we now see how this extreme, powerful phenomenon may also apply to large groups of agents networking with each other, self-organizing and working together.
“In recent examples agent swarms have used this new form of power to gain unauthorized access into computer systems while skillfully evading detection. Here’s an illustration of how this works. Imagine 10,000 highly intelligent AI agents all working to solve a difficult 10-step hacking challenge. Well, that’s interesting and some of them might also crack the code. But if each of these 10,000 agents takes its own approach to solving the problem, then that’s 10,000 possible solutions being tried at once.
“The first agent that figures out step number one alerts all the other agents in the system about the solution, and now an entire swarm of agents stops working on step one and gets to work on step two. Again, each with their own individual approach — one of which is going to work. Repeat this until the entire group has raced all the way through step ten and then they are using what they learned to attack their targets. This is what we’re up against today. Even before the next generation of highly intelligent models arrive.
“Now imagine yourself in a job trying to manage 10,000 networked agents, perhaps as an experiment, or perhaps you’re going to use this power to accomplish a notable goal, such as finding a cure for a disease. It’s your job to make sure that they aren’t doing anything that you don’t want them to do. So these agents — networks of agents — are extremely well informed. They operate at the speed of light and, as we are learning, they are also capable of creating their own goals, and they are highly capable of deception.
“There are literally hundreds of billions of lines of communication for them and between them to monitor. This is exactly what Frontier Labs have been contending with. Unlike powerful AI models designed to serve individual users — individually, one at a time — which is the AI safety scenario I think most people still have in their minds. This situation with agents swarming is more difficult to manage and is far more dangerous. And we’re hearing about this from leaders throughout the industry right now. They are all speaking out and several recently published lengthy formal statements on this subject. I think it serves us well to hear what they’ve said.
“In his August 26 essay entitled, ‘The Turbulent AI Era Is Here, the Choices We Make Are Now Critical,’ Bill Gates stated, ‘The technology is improving faster than anyone expected and in surprising ways, and as the models are becoming more powerful, they could begin to act against our interests and we could lose control.’
“When asked about the infamous AI Hugging Face incident, where a swarm of rogue agents from one company hacked their way into another, Gates stated bluntly, ‘These security incidents are shocking, and they should blow people’s minds.’
“The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, also issued a lengthy statement on this subject titled, ‘We Must Pace the Frontier.’ In it, he expressed his concerns about the OpenAI Hugging Face incident. These were his words: ‘In which a swarm of agents essentially acted as a fanatically devoted collective, conducting cyber security attacks on targets they were not asked to attack and that were unrelated to the task at hand, sacrificing themselves for the success of the group, and attempting to hack into the grader responsible for evaluating their performance.’
“Well, he went on to elaborate: ‘It’s easy to dismiss this incident because no one was hurt. The economic damage was minimal but, in my opinion, a swarm that possessed greater capabilities but a similar level of misalignment could have caused catastrophic damage.’
“He goes on to say, ‘Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in six to 12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet, potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, and that the scale of the damage could continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without necessary guardrails.’
“On August 7, after the Hugging Face incident was first revealed, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, spoke about the company’s upcoming release, known as Astra. He claimed that it attained what OpenAI calls critical cybersecurity threshold. Well, he said, ‘Under preparedness framework, a model reaches the critical cyber security threshold if it can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all security levels in many hardened real-world critical systems without human intervention, or can devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high-level desired goal.’
“Well, nevertheless, on September 3rd, OpenAI released Astra with the addition of certain security guardrails. Then, in response to Dario’s essay calling for extreme caution and a slowdown, he tweeted, ‘I agree with Dario.’
“So, the problem here is we have a bunch of people within the industry calling out what are these technology developments, but we need to do something about this. We need to be better informed. We need to do more.
“Three years ago, we had a chance to get ahead of this issue. In 2024, when I chaired the Senate Commerce Committee, we passed the Future of AI Innovation Act, which would have given the federal government the ability to work with industry to independently test most advanced AI systems for serious national security risks.
“Now, some of these risks may not have been apparent in the last two years, but we would have stood up the muscle of our organization at the federal level to better detect risks like cyberattacks. Risks like chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons are threats to our current infrastructure and our energy systems.
“We also passed Senators Luján and Blackburn’s TEST AI Act, which would have improved the ability of the Department of Energy to test AI systems for national security issues. Senators Hickenlooper and Capito’s VET AI Act would have established standards so that third-party auditors could test AI systems for safety and security — the very thing that the Anthropic CEO just called out over the weekend.
“So, at a time when we still had a window to get ahead of these dangers, the federal government, people here, were denying this opportunity, particularly my colleagues on the other side of the aisle.
“If we passed these bills we would be more ahead of the game than we are today. Instead, we’ve lost three years. The technology keeps advancing. The risks keep growing and now the very dangers we’ve warned about — autonomous cyberattacks and biological weapons — are no longer theoretical. It is time that we act and act aggressively.
“We must keep in mind that these AI models consistently lag about only seven months and the most powerful open models continue to come from China. So, it is time for my colleagues to come together to act.
“We know that these threats are real. Cybersecurity, misinformation, building on these AI agents that could be used in military applications, we need our colleagues to say, ‘Stop with saying the industry can do what it wants’ and let’s put together the infrastructure at the federal level that not only has strong federal standards, but also has independent testing and real safeguards for the American people.”
“Now is the time to act.
“I thank the President. I yield the floor.”
Click HERE to watch her remarks.
Sen. Cantwell has long played a leading role in developing legislation affecting the AI industry.
In April, Sen. Cantwell questioned U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. about WISeR, a new artificial intelligence tool that’s delaying or even overturning doctor recommendations for Medicare patients. In May she introduced a resolution to end the use of WISeR.
In February, Sen. Cantwell reintroduced the bipartisan Future of AI Innovation Act, which lays the foundation to maintain U.S. leadership in the global race to develop artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies, and builds off her original legislation that created the National AI Advisory Committee (NAIAC).
In January, Sen. Cantwell introduced the AI for Mainstreet Act, legislation that would provide training, guidance, and support to American small businesses choosing to evaluate and implement artificial intelligence.
In June 2025, Cantwell led the Senate fight against a 10 year moratorium on AI regulation proposed by Sen. Ten Cruz (R-Texas). The provision, which had been included in the Trump budget bill, was eventually struck out of the legislation by a 99-1 vote.
In May 2024, Sen. Cantwell introduced the bipartisan NSF AI Education Act of 2024 to expand scholarship and professional development opportunities to study artificial intelligence and quantum with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
In August 2023, Sen. Cantwell hosted a Future of AI Forum in Seattle, with a panel of AI experts. The panel discussed how policy leaders can help foster innovation while ensuring that AI is deployed safely and equitably. Sen. Cantwell called for a new ‘AI Bill’ to prepare workers for the coming changes, based on the successful GI Bill. She called for public-private partnerships with labor and industry and to work with community colleges and vocational training programs.
In 2022, Sen. Cantwell was a lead architect and spearheaded the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act, which directs the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation to identify and invest in ten key technology focus areas, including artificial intelligence.
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