‘They can’t even spell AI’: Republican offers brutal take as Congress flees Hill amid calls for oversight
Por Eric Garcia — – World RSS Feed
‘They can’t even spell AI’: Republican offers brutal take as Congress flees Hill amid calls for oversight
Blunt congressman tells The Independent that Congress is not good at regulating while his colleagues are split on the matter amid fears artificial intelligence could one day run amok
Eric Garcia Wednesday 16 September 2026 20:14 BST
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Amid calls to regulate AI and President Donald Trump saying he is all the guardrail America needs, a conservative Republican from Tennessee is bluntly warning that Congress is not up to the task.
Rep. Tim Burchett said Congress simply does not know enough to create adequate safeguards around AI when approached by The Independent this week before the House of Representatives was sent home until after the midterm elections.
“So this bunch trying to regulate anything is a dangerous proposition,” he told The Independent. “Some of these guys, they go home, they got a ’72 Vega in the driveway with an eight-track tape player, and they want to talk to me about technology, and they can’t even spell AI much less know what it is.”
Burchett’s frank and homespun comments come as largely Democrats, but also a handful of Republicans, have sounded the alarm after Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic resigned and warned that people working on AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
But Burchett pointed to the way Congress has regulated everything from AI to college sports — as an argument against his workplace being nvolved in further AI oversight.
open image in gallery“I mean, look what they did to college sports,” the colorful congressman said. “Oh yeah, they killed it. Oh, what did they do to healthcare? They killed it. What they do to education, they just about killed it, too. So this bunch trying to regulate anything is a dangerous proposition.”
Burchett was referring to how Washington and the NCAA have let college sports run amok with name, image and likeness deals for college athletes and unlimited transfer portals that let them jump from one school to another freely. The Tennessee Republican said that Washington’s poor leadership with college sports shows it cannot be trusted with regulating AI.
The revelations by Coxon and calls from other corners of the AI industry for strong regulation has largely split Congress, and not necessarily on ideological lines. Some argue that new laws need to be put in place, while many conservative Republicans say that United States should not rein in AI lest the country lose the technology race to China.
Burchett’s words came as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) convened a summit on human-centered AI with an unlikely cohort — conservative former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Sanders told The Independent that he worried about AI’s influence in politics could water down any guardrails for AI, but still seemed optimistic.
“Look, our goal in a very complicated issue is to depend upon the most knowledgeable people in our country, and there are many who want to do the right thing and who want to protect the American people,” he said.
open image in gallerySome members of Congress have proposed new rules on AI. Reps. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) and Jay Obernolte (D-Calif.) wrote the FRONTIER Act, which would create a tiered system for AI companies and require independent audits.
“We don’t have any regulation at the federal level, and the danger that we run is of having 50 different state regulations that regulate AI in 50 different ways,” Obernolte told The Independent. “That’s very dangerous and adversarial to entrepreneurialism.”
Obernolte said he did not necessarily fear AI becoming sentient, but he worried about bad actors using it.
“I mean, what scares me the most is the malicious use of AI in the hands of human actors,” he said. “Not an army of evil robots rising up to take over the world, but humans using AI to make themselves more productive in stealing people’s money or spreading misinformation.”
Trahan for her part dismissed Trump’s comments that “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades.”
open image in gallery
open image in gallery“I think it’s completely misguided,” she told The Independent. “We need Congress to get off the sidelines.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson has dismissed the need to regulate AI, saying there are already product liability laws under which AI can fall.
“Here’s the problem: If I called an emergency session today and I brought everybody in the house and said, ‘Let’s regulate AI,’ nobody in the room knows yet what that should look like,” Johnson said at his Tuesday press conference. “Why? Because we don’t have the latest information.”
But Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a populist who represents much of Silicon Valley, said new laws needed to be passed and current laws must be enforced.
“We need to enforce the criminal laws, people are doing knowingly harm or putting us at risk, they need to be prosecuted or held civilly liable,” Khanna said. “This is technical stuff, but we need people who know what they’re talking about to really get serious about regulation.”
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