House members want Congress to skip recess and pass AI safeguards

With midterm elections right around the corner, U.S. lawmakers are usually desperate to hit the campaign trail. A few House members, however, are begging to stay in Washington to deal with a different kind of crisis.

According to an Axios report, California Representative Sam Liccardo drafted a letter urging House Speaker Mike Johnson to cancel an upcoming congressional recess. The letter, co-signed by Representatives George Whitesides, Lori Trahan, and Ted Lieu, asks lawmakers to remain in session until bipartisan AI safeguards are passed.

The House was scheduled to return on Monday for just one week before taking off until November 9. But lawmakers say existential warnings from current and former Anthropic researchers mean Congress cannot afford to wait. Those scientists warned that frontier AI could pose genuine existential threats to humanity within the next decade.

A kill switch before the midterms

The letter points to two major bipartisan proposals currently stalled on Capitol Hill.

The first is the AI Kill Switch Act, which would legally require developers to ensure humans retain the ability to slow down or completely power off AI systems. The second is the FRONTIER Act, designed to create a national regulatory framework for frontier models.

Yet House Speaker Mike Johnson has given no sign that either bill will see the light of day before November. Johnson does plan to hold a vote next week on legislation addressing data center energy costs, but broad safety regulations are noticeably missing from the calendar.

Why it matters

We think this push shows just how wide the gap has grown between AI researchers and Capitol Hill leadership.

For developers and frontier labs, this letter is a preview of the regulatory baseline that Washington eventually wants to impose. Building a mandatory kill switch into agentic systems will not just be an engineering challenge; it could fundamentally alter how autonomous systems are designed and deployed.

Liccardo and his colleagues are being smart by citing researchers from inside the industry rather than relying on partisan talking points. Framing catastrophic risk through Anthropic's own warnings gives the plea a level of credibility that regular political debates lack.

The roadblock, of course, is raw electoral politics. Speaker Johnson is willing to move on data center electricity bills because power grids and utility prices immediately impact voters at home. Existential safety, on the other hand, does not win swing seats. Unless leadership unexpectedly yields, meaningful federal guardrails will likely remain frozen until next year.