Rick Scott
Role at the time: United States senator from Florida, speaking to reporters
Statement summary
Sen. Rick Scott split his answer on AI regulation. On children's safety he said Congress can act now, that he has introduced a bill and others have too, and that children must be told they are talking to a computer rather than a person and that AI systems cannot encourage them to take their own lives. On what he called destroying mankind, he said the companies need to do the right thing on their own, that Congress will not get smart enough to regulate them and will not get something done. The clip circulated widely with only the self-regulation passage quoted.
“I think first we need to be focused on kids safety. I think that's something we actually can do right now. I've got a bill. Others have bills. … But with regard to destroying mankind, these companies need to do the right thing on their own. We're not going to get smart enough to regulate them. We're not going to get something done up here to regulate them. But with regard to our kids, we need to make sure … they know that this is not a human being these kids are talking to, and they cannot be teaching our kids to commit suicide.”
Forty-five-second clip of Sen. Rick Scott posted by journalist Aaron Rupar on September 17, 2026 at 3:54 PM ET. Rupar aggregates broadcast and Capitol footage; the clip does not identify the programme or setting, and Scott's reference to getting "something done up here" suggests Capitol Hill. The post's text quotes only the self-regulation passage; the audio shows Scott bracketing it with support for child-safety legislation he says he has already introduced, so the clip as a whole is materially broader than the quoted excerpt. Scott made a related argument to The Hill on September 15, asking whether Congress is capable of regulating AI when it cannot pass a budget; that is a separate statement and is not recorded here.
Why we used this label
Scott combines materially different positions on it: he supports federal legislation on child safety and says he has already introduced a bill, while rejecting federal action on catastrophic risk and directing that to industry self-regulation. That is the definition of “Mixed or conditional”. The closest competing label is condemns, which is how this case classifies speakers who reject the proposition outright, including Huang (727), Johnson (729) and Zuckerberg (939); it loses because Scott does not reject federal safeguards as such but carves out a category where he is actively legislating. Note that the widely circulated excerpt carries only the self-regulation half, which on its own would read as condemns; the full clip does not support that.