Nancy Mace rejects an AI pause: "China will not pause. China will eat our lunch."
U.S. Representative for South Carolina's 1st congressional district, replying on her verified X account
“China will not pause. China will eat our lunch.”
Source and context
Original post
About this source
First-party reply from Rep. Nancy Mace's verified X account on September 13, 2026, answering Rep. Ro Khanna's call to pause recursive self-improving AI, which itself quote-posted Dario Amodei's essay announcement. The reply is the whole of her statement; she offers no further reasoning in it.
Before the quotation
Dario Amodei had published an essay arguing the AI industry should slow down and announced Anthropic would give third-party evaluators permanent employee-level access. Ro Khanna replied that this did not go nearly far enough and called for pausing recursive self-improving AI and for criminal and civil liability for AI that causes damage.
After the quotation
The competitiveness objection recurs across this dossier, including from Speaker Mike Johnson, President Trump and Sen. John Cornyn. Rep. Yassamin Ansari separately rejected a related Republican argument, that Congress lacks the expertise to regulate AI, on September 17.
How this statement is classified
Case context: Should Washington impose stronger safeguards on frontier AI?
The label describes this statement’s response within the context above.
Why this label?
The case's fixed reference point is the proposition that Washington should impose stronger safeguards on frontier AI. Mace rejects it, treating a pause as self-defeating because a strategic competitor would not reciprocate. That is the competitiveness argument this dossier already records from Mike Johnson (729), who opposed a moratorium because "China will overlap us," and from Trump (556, 572), and all are classified condemns. The closest competing label is mixed_or_conditional; it loses because she names no safeguard she would accept and attaches no condition, offering only the objection.
- Recorded on
- Published here
- People and groups discussed
- Ro Khanna
Should Washington impose stronger safeguards on frontier AI?
Explore the case context, sources and public responses.
More from this case
Read the full case“I think what we should be doing now is setting ourselves up to be able to navigate that better. So what does that mean? It means… anything around more transparency from the company, so disclosure requirements… federal requirements around sharing what kind of AIs they’re training, what kind of tests they’re running, why they think what they’re doing is safe, what their security practices are… I do think the third-party auditors is an important element… Would love to see better kind of incident reporting but also investigations… you could have kind of a … government entity that is able to actually go in … demand information. I think that is where I would start.” … “I actually think more useful than a kill switch is kind of emergency intervention powers of different kinds… giving… government the ability to intervene in the case of an emergency… could be helpful. I think having clearer standards on what is okay development practices here.” … “We also need to have kind of these regulatory frameworks… looking internally at their development practices as well.”Read statement
“I will not hinder or stifle the growth of AI.”Read statement
“I joined @RepYassAnsari and more than two dozen @HouseDemocrats in urging Donald Trump to take urgent action to address the serious risks posed by frontier AI.”Read statement