‘Godfather of AI’ warns Congress has ‘maybe a year’ left to regulate AI

WASHINGTON — Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate known as the “ Godfather of AI ,” issued an ominous warning to lawmakers: Congress may have only one year left to implement safeguards on artificial intelligence before it loses control of it.

“Maybe a year, but not much more than a year,” Hinton said Wednesday evening after he and other AI experts huddled with Senate and House lawmakers behind closed doors. “If you look at predictions for when we’ll get superintelligence,” he continued, “it used to be maybe 30 years, maybe 50 years. Then it came down to maybe 10 years, maybe 20 years. Now people are saying, a lot of the researchers are saying only a few years.”

Hinton and other experts came to Capitol Hill at the invitation of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., one of the chamber’s chief critics of AI, who invited lawmakers of both parties to the private briefing. Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy was the only Republican to attend.

'Godfather of AI': Congress has about a year to get ahead of AI

Hinton’s dire warning came as the House departed Washington for the last time before the November midterm elections. And there appeared to be lots of conversations but little sign of progress on any substantial AI regulation in the Senate.

“This is bats--- crazy, insane science fiction stuff that literally happened recently,” Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., a member of House Democratic leadership, told NBC News after Wednesday’s briefing.

Lieu was referring to the Hugging Face incident , when a swarm of OpenAI agents accessed the internet, hacked the platform Hugging Face and tried to cover their tracks to deceive humans about their actions. Hinton, who resigned as a vice president and engineering fellow at Google in 2023 over concerns about AI safety and went on to win the Nobel Prize in physics the following year, called the hack a “little Chernobyl.”

“AI has now reached the point where AI is designing better AI,” Hinton told reporters after the briefing. “That’s called recursive self-improvement. ... It is going to get out of control unless we do something. We need to slow down.”