Thom Tillis
Role at the time: Retiring United States senator speaking to reporters
Mixed or conditional
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,”
Open source (opens in a new tab)AI threats confront a Congress far from erecting guardrailsCongressional reaction round-up quoting Johnson, Thune, Barrasso, Cruz, Tillis and Cantwell.
Roll Call report posted 6:23pm on September 15, 2026 and updated at 9:36pm. Reports that neither party has coalesced around a legislative plan and that action before the midterms looks unlikely.
Why we used this label
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.