Retiring United States senator from North Carolina.
Case
Jon Ossoff urges inspections, legislation and an AI treaty; Donald Trump says existing federal powers are sufficient. Their opposing positions raise a concrete question: should Washington add safeguards for frontier AI?
Role at the time: Retiring United States senator speaking to reporters
Statement summary
Tillis said industry should first organise its own regulation and enforcement, and that Congress could then codify some of those rules.
“I think the industry needs to get a kind of Manhattan Project going, figure out what they need to do to self-regulate, and then what they need in order to enable them to have a consequence if people fall outside of those regulations. … We could codify some of them,”
Tillis neither endorses nor rejects the case proposition. He pushes back on the hoax framing and allows that Congress could codify rules, while insisting the sequence must start with industry. That conditional support is why this is mixed rather than a defense or a rejection.
Statement dates: September 15, 2026
Statement dates: September 15, 2026
