Nancy Mace
Role at the time: U.S. Representative for South Carolina's 1st congressional district, replying on her verified X account
Statement summary
Replying to Rep. Ro Khanna's call to pause recursive self-improving AI and impose criminal and civil liability, Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina rejected the proposal on competitiveness grounds, saying China will not pause and will eat the United States' lunch. The reply is the whole of her statement and offers no further reasoning. Her prediction about Chinese conduct is an assertion, not an established finding.
“China will not pause. China will eat our lunch.”
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.
Why we used 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.