By Rajwa Quasim
Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., issued a warning to the Trump administration over its approach to regulating major technology companies and its reliance on tech executives to police the artificial intelligence industry.
In a short video posted on his X account, Khanna said, “I represent a district in Silicon Valley. I know the culture. I’ve been in the rooms. Mr. President, you cannot trust tech billionaires to write the rules to keep us safe or protect our jobs.”
His remarks came after Trump told reporters that major technology companies would engage in what he called “tremendous self-policing” following a White House meeting with leading AI executives.
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The video then showed Trump saying, “Well, I think I’m saying tremendous self-policing and they understand that they have the self-policing.”
Khanna said, “They can build companies. They can build apps. They cannot be given keys to our democracy.”
Khanna has represented California’s 17th Congressional District in the House since 2017. His remarks came as he pushed for legislation that would impose new federal safeguards on advanced AI systems.
On Sept. 29, Khanna introduced the “Human Control Over AI Act,” which would prohibit AI models from recursively improving themselves or autonomously modifying their core objectives, containment or shutdown controls until federal safeguards are established and a designated federal agency approves such activities. The legislation would also create a federal agency to license, audit and regulate frontier AI models.
Recursive self-improvement, or RSI, refers to AI systems taking an increasingly autonomous role in improving their own capabilities or developing successor systems. Researchers and AI companies have raised concerns about the potential risks associated with such systems, although fully autonomous recursive self-improvement has not been achieved.
Khanna has described the legislation as comprehensive AI safety legislation. His proposal comes amid broader debate over whether advanced AI development should be governed primarily through government regulation or voluntary industry standards.
The debate intensified after Trump hosted leading AI executives at the White House on Tuesday. Executives including Elon Musk of SpaceX’s AI business, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Greg Brockman of OpenAI and Dario Amodei of Anthropic signed a voluntary “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities.”
Trump said the executives had agreed that the industry needs “tremendous self-regulation,” while the agreement stops short of imposing legally binding requirements. The commitment calls for companies developing frontier AI models to establish internal controls, work with independent external auditors and create board-level oversight mechanisms.
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Khanna has also called for international limits on recursive self-improvement. In a recent proposal for U.S.-China cooperation on AI safety, he advocated a global pause on recursive self-improvement and a separate pause on superintelligence development.
The Trump administration has taken a different approach, emphasizing continued AI development and voluntary industry commitments rather than broad new federal restrictions. Trump recently directed federal agencies to use “Super Intelligence,” or “SI,” in place of “artificial intelligence” in certain official communications.
A Facebook user commenting on an AFL-CIO post about Khanna’s remarks wrote, “If corporations could self-regulate, we wouldn’t need a federal government.”