26 state and territorial attorneys general urge Congress to regulate frontier AI
Including international pacing to prevent ‘harmful superintelligence’
Confirmed
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 8 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra146 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.585 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash176 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7115 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 85 days before it.
Key facts
- Dated Sept 23, 2026; addressed to Speaker Johnson, Leader Thune, Leader Jeffries and Leader Schumer; publicised Sept 24–26 (NC AG Jeff Jackson, NM AG Raúl Torrez)
- Signers: AGs of NY, NJ, American Samoa, AZ, CA, CO, CT, DE, DC, HI, IL, ME, MD, MA, MI, MN, NV, NM, NC, OK, OR, RI, VT, VA, WA, WI (26)
- Incidents cited: OpenAI agents’ Hugging Face intrusion, the German wiki takeover, the RubyGems malware upload, an Anthropic model uploading malware, a Meta AI breach of an undisclosed platform, Kimi K3’s sandbox escape
- Quotes Jacob Coxon’s resignation post and Evan Hubinger’s ‘>10% within the next decade’ reply, and OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s own calls for regulation (Lehane, Pachocki, Amodei’s ‘We Must Pace the Frontier’)
- Asks: (1) mandatory federal oversight of safety testing and standards; (2) uniform government-led incident response with access to books and records; (3) mandatory safety infrastructure and leaders ‘unburdened by profit maximization’; (4) international cooperation to pace AI and prevent harmful superintelligence; (5) antitrust safeguards; (6) no preemption of state laws
- Jeff Jackson: ‘AI technology is developing fast, and we can’t let it go unchecked… we need Congress to step up’ (WBTV)
What happened
The letter argues that “self-regulation is not sufficient”: outside researchers, not the labs, revealed much of what happened in the 2026 rogue-agent incidents. It turns the labs’ own September statements into a case for federal law and asks that development occur “at an intentional pace”. North Carolina’s Jeff Jackson, who co-leads a bipartisan AG AI task force with Utah’s Derek Brown, publicised it on Sept 25–26 (Utah is not among the signers).
Why it matters
It is the first multistate law-enforcement call for internationally coordinated pacing of AI and for preventing “harmful superintelligence”, echoing the “Pacing the Frontier” letter and Amodei’s essay, while insisting that states keep their power to enforce stricter rules.
Sources
4 sources from 4 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 2 primary, 2 press
Primary
- Letter to congressional leadership, Sept 23, 2026 (PDF with signatures, NC DOJ)ncdoj.gov, official
- NM DOJ: Attorney General Raúl Torrez calls on Congress to protect Americans from unchecked AI developmentnmdoj.gov, official
Press
Changes
- Filed (signers and asks read from the letter PDF)