Pass Federal AI Safety Legislation Before Self-Improving AI Escapes Human Control

Congress needs to act now on binding AI safety legislation — not voluntary guidelines, not industry pledges, but real enforceable rules with a mechanism to pause frontier AI development when risks escalate. Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark went on CNN this week and said the industry is far closer to "full recursive self-improvement" — AI that builds and advances itself without human involvement — than anyone expected. His own analogy says it all: we are driving at high speed with a gas pedal and no brake pedal. The stakes here are not abstract. Clark publicly questioned how humanity maintains control over fleets of AI systems that are faster and more capable than any human scientist. That warning is coming from inside the industry, from a company simultaneously filing for an IPO to raise tens of billions of dollars to accelerate development. If even the builders admit the brake pedal doesn't exist yet, Congress cannot wait for the market to sort this out. Mandate safety thresholds, require independent audits, and give regulators the authority to pause development when those thresholds are crossed.