Washington, D.C. — Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) is waging a one-man campaign against basic AI safety protections, and he apparently wants both government and independent experts kept as far away from the process as possible. Schmitt has spent years casting the federal government itself as illegitimate, calling government decisionmaking he didn’t like “unconstitutional” and vowing to fight the so-called “administrative state.” Now he’s applying that same conspiratorial framework to artificial intelligence, working to strip private sector safety experts of any role in overseeing the frontier labs building the most powerful AI systems in the world.
Functionally, Schmitt is asking Americans to accept a system with no safeguards at all: no independent technical review, no meaningful check on the labs racing to build ever more powerful models, and no protection against the risks researchers are already flagging, from child safety to mass job displacement to extinction-risk estimates that have leading AI scientists sounding alarms.
Schmitt is increasingly isolated in this position. The push for AI guardrails spans a bipartisan coalition that includes his own Missouri colleague, Senator Josh Hawley, all the way to Senator Bernie Sanders, united by a shared recognition that unchecked, unmonitored corporate power over frontier AI poses a danger too large to ignore.
In response, Congressional Integrity Project Senior Adviser Jeremy Funk released the following statement:
“Eric Schmitt wants to clear the field so the AI labs can build as fast and as recklessly as they want, the American people be damned. He wants to strip out the only people qualified to catch these risks before they hurt ordinary Americans, all so he can keep spewing conspiratorial nonsense and protect the Trump family stock portfolio. He stands firmly against the broad, bipartisan majorities who don’t want noisy, expensive data centers in their communities, and who don’t want to be extinct in ten years.”
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