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John Kennedy
United States Senator for Louisiana and the only Republican to attend the closed Senate briefing on AI risk of September 2026, who warns that recursive self-improvement could turn AI from a tool controlled by humans into an independent species superior to our own, and that even a 1% chance of it killing all of us has to be taken seriously.
Roles
On the record
17 Sept 2026 · Statement · NBC News
If you have fire ants in your kitchen, you’re probably going to step on them … What would happen if we created an independent species that became superior to a human species? Would they step on us? Would they create a virus or a bacteria that can spread as quickly as the common cold to kill all of us? Now, if there’s a 1% chance of that, we have to take it seriously. And I don’t think the United States Congress is ready yet to try to reach a global solution.
United States Senator from Louisiana, United States Senate at the time
The ellipsis stands where the page prints an attribution tag (“,” he said. “), so the two halves are consecutive blocks of the same remark rather than one continuous sentence. Minutes later Senator Rand Paul blocked his request for unanimous consent on his own kill-switch bill. The briefing itself is dated on the page only as “Wednesday evening”; the date given is the date printed on the page carrying the words.
‘Godfather of AI’ warns Congress has ‘maybe a year’ left to regulate AI →
17 Sept 2026 · Statement · NBC News
what happens when AI no longer is a tool controlled by humans, but AI through recursive self-improvement becomes an independent species
United States Senator from Louisiana, United States Senate at the time
Speaking to reporters after the closed bipartisan briefing convened by Senator Bernie Sanders, at which Geoffrey Hinton, Max Tegmark and Ajeya Cotra addressed lawmakers. The page prints these words in quotation marks inside its own sentence — Kennedy “said that the experts discussed the ‘larger risk’ of” — so the quotation begins in lower case, as printed.
‘Godfather of AI’ warns Congress has ‘maybe a year’ left to regulate AI →