WATCH: Gallego Calls for Senate Committee to Rein-in AI, Celebrates Supreme Court’s Mail-in Voting Decision

WASHINGTON – Last night, on MSNOW’s “The Weeknight,” Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) echoed his call to establish a bipartisan Senate Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence to rein-in the technology — largely in response to a former Anthropic researcher quitting his role and warning of an industrywide rush to build AI systems that can improve themselves and, in turn, destroy humanity — and applauded the Supreme Court’s decision to prevent the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) from implementing President Trump’s executive order restricting vote-by-mail ahead of the midterm elections. WATCH: MS NOW’s The Weeknight On getting all stakeholders together to regulate AI: “We need experts to come in and talk to us—the people who are skeptics, the people who want to regulate, and the people who have a vision for AI. The problem that we have right now is that we don’t know enough… We need to be bringing the best minds around us and figure out how to put up guardrails, and how to do it quickly. “I’m glad that they [the AI companies] are coming out, but can we really trust people that have an interest, a very corporate—corporate interest for them, for whatever outcome, right? They have to respond to corporate shareholders. We have to respond to the American public, right? I have to make sure that whatever outcome that we decide to put together for these guardrails aren’t designed basically to cover their asses for whatever they mess up later, right? On the first steps a Senate Select Committee would take: “The first thing we would fix is: get the people around you, besides those three [Musk, Dario, Altman], to give you the information you need to know how bad this is and where this is going. “Step two is: Are we looking too small? You know, this is going to have to end up being an international agreement, right? Where we have to talk to not just China, the European Union, other friends and allies, to make sure that we all are staying together on this. Because if there’s any type of leakage, if any types of these agents go rogue, they’re not going to care if this was created in China. They will go after the United States and go after China later, or at the same time.” On President Trump dismissing concerns over AI: “This is why I’m very much in favor of putting a commission together that is akin to the 9/11 Commission to come up with the recommendations that we need, to put into text and move fast. And if their president doesn’t want to vote for this, then we have the votes to override that president because it is bad. “The voter is really scared about what’s happening right now. They’re scared that their jobs are going to be taken, that their lives are going to be taken. What we understand is humanity could be totally gone within a couple of years.” On the victory in the Supreme Court over mail-in voting decision: “That’s good for the voters. And look, Arizona—80% of voters in Arizona vote by mail. The vote-by-mail system was started by Republicans. It’s safe. It’s secure. We don’t need last-minute chaos going into an election that’s less than 60 days away. “Let’s continue moving forward. The Postal Service is there to deliver mail. They’re not there to decide who can get ballots or not. That’s the job of the secretaries of state.”