Rand Paul
Role at the time: United States senator from Kentucky, as reported by ABC News
Statement summary
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky blocked fellow Republican John Kennedy's attempt to fast-track a bill requiring AI companies to be able to deploy a kill switch, on the grounds that Congress does not understand the technology well enough to regulate it. The wording here is ABC News's report of his reasoning rather than a verbatim quotation from Paul, and is recorded on that basis.
“Congress doesn't understand the technology well enough to regulate it.”
ABC News segment posted to the network's X account at 11:39 AM ET on September 17, 2026. Besides Hinton it carries several other figures relevant to this case and not yet recorded from it: Sen. John Kennedy attempting to fast-track a bill requiring AI companies to be able to deploy a kill switch, saying there is "even a 1% chance" a model could shed its nature as a tool and become an independent species; Sen. Rand Paul blocking that proposal on the grounds that Congress does not understand the technology well enough to regulate it; and an unnamed senior Trump adviser saying existing law already makes AI companies liable for harmful products. The segment also reports that Anthropic's chief executive wants coordinated industry safety standards and has said this may require an antitrust waiver, which senators of both parties have resisted. One line in the segment — "This is bat crazy insane science fiction stuff" — is spoken over Hinton's probability estimate and is not Hinton's; the speaker is not identified in the clip, so it is not attributed here.
Why we used this label
Paul rejects it in the most direct way available to a senator, by blocking a specific safeguard from advancing, and grounds that refusal in a claim about congressional competence rather than about the risk. That places him with Huang (727), Johnson (729) and Zuckerberg (939), who reject the proposition. The closest competing label is “Mixed or conditional”, on the reading that his objection is about capability rather than principle and might be met by better-informed legislators; it loses because he acted to stop the measure rather than conditioning support on anything. Sen. Rick Scott (984) makes a similar competence argument but is classified “Mixed or conditional” because he simultaneously legislates on child safety, which Paul does not.