In the Senate, experts give a year to regulate AI; the president announces an “AI Force” with no brakes on development

On Wednesday 17 September 2026, Capitol Hill hosted a closed-door briefing on artificial intelligence, convened at the invitation of Senator Bernie Sanders and open to lawmakers from both parties, according to NBC News. Nobel physics laureate Geoffrey Hinton and other experts took part; The Next Web lists MIT physicist Max Tegmark and researcher Ajeya Cotra among the attendees. Again according to The Next Web, no representatives of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or Meta were present, unlike at previous Senate forums on AI. Because the session was held privately and without public minutes, what the experts said is known through the remarks Hinton made to reporters afterwards. He put the time left to introduce rules at roughly a year: “Maybe a year, but not much more than a year”, explaining the estimate by pointing to the shrinking timelines for superintelligence. In a line reported by The Next Web, Hinton observes that “AI has now reached the point where AI is designing better AI”.

The technical discussion was immediately mirrored by political friction in the Senate, where the only Republican at the meeting was Senator John Kennedy, according to NBC News and The Next Web. In the hours that followed, a unanimous-consent request made by Kennedy himself to introduce shutdown mechanisms for advanced models was blocked by Senator Rand Paul. The outlets diverge on the exact name of the proposal — NBC News refers to the AI Kill Switch Act introduced in the House by Representatives Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran, while The Next Web mentions an “AI Emergency Button Act” — but the political veto on an emergency stop is the verified common ground.

Two days later, on Saturday 19 September 2026, US President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he intends to set up an “AI Force” modelled on the Space Force and to appoint an “AI Czar”. A czar post covering artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies had already been held by David Sacks, who left it during 2026 because of the time limits that apply to special government employees, as NBC News reports. In his announcement, covered by NBC News, FOX 5 DC and The Washington Post, the president ruled out constraints on the sector's development. In his message, according to NBC News and FOX 5 DC, he wrote: “We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry”, adding: “We are leading China, and the rest of the World, and I intend to keep it that way!”. At the time of the announcement, however, the White House gave no details, and no formal act, budget allocation or name for the coordinator has been published — a coordinator for whom Trump indicated that “only High I.Q. individuals need apply”.

The forty-eight hours between the scientists' alarm and the presidential promise not to slow the sector down do not establish any documented cause and effect. They do, though, throw Washington's strategic fault line into relief: on one side the urgency of researchers watching how fast these systems develop on their own; on the other a political choice that puts geopolitical competition ahead of spelling out precise safety protocols. In between, the absence of a comprehensive federal law remains the only certainty. — Olya