Coxon is at minimum the fifth insider in three years to warn the industry is moving too fast to be safe, but none of the previous four produced anything like this week’s response. Geoffrey Hinton left Google in May 2023 specifically to speak freely about the risk, making him one of the most quoted people in tech that year but producing no legislation. Jan Leike resigned from OpenAI in May 2024, writing that “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products”; Ilya Sutskever resigned the same month amid disputes that had briefly ousted Sam Altman. Neither produced a bill. Mrinank Sharma, an Anthropic safeguards researcher, resigned in February 2026 warning “the world is in peril,” and yet, no congressional action.

What was different this time was that a current Anthropic employee, Evan Hubinger, who leads the company’s Alignment Science team, publicly backed the claim within hours, putting greater than 10% odds on human extinction within a decade and saying Anthropic has no concrete plan for controlling superintelligent systems. Two other Anthropic researchers joined in. This may finally produce a political reaction, one that was nine years in the making.

A decade of inaction

The FUTURE of AI Act was introduced in 2017, before Congress even tracked “artificial intelligence” as its own category. It would have created a federal public-private framework to study AI, but it didn’t go far. Two years later, Rep. Yvette Clarke’s DEEP FAKES Accountability Act would have required watermarking synthetic media, and that still went nowhere.

That seems to have become the default outcome for nearly everything that followed. The one thing that did pass wasn’t really about safety: in 2020, Congress folded the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act into that year’s defense bill to fund research and workforce training—competitiveness spending, not regulation. Since then, bills moved to remain competitive, not for safety.

Everything accelerated once ChatGPT launched, in November 2022. By January 2023, Rep. Ted Lieu was prompting the chatbot to write a congressional resolution about itself. The first serious response from industry came on May 16, 2023, when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee and asked to be regulated, proposing a licensing agency that could approve or revoke permission to build the most powerful AI systems. Sen. Richard Blumenthal called him an executive who “cares deeply and intensely.” And yet, zero legislative text.

By June 2023, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer decided hearings were the wrong tool and announced nine closed-door “AI Insight Forums” for tech CEOs to brief senators. More than 60 senators showed up to the first one alongside Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Sundar Pichai. Sen. Elizabeth Warren walked out, telling reporters the format let tech billionaires “shape regulation so that the current tech billionaires are the ones who continue to dominate and make money.” Sen. John Thune called it “not efficient.” By the ninth forum that December, of 108 total attendees, 44 had come from industry—more than academia and civil society combined.

Five months later, Schumer’s group released a “Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence Policy” that advocacy groups condemned as proof of “Big Tech’s profound and pervasive power to shape the policymaking process.” No bill ever followed it. The one concrete 2023 outcome came from the president instead of Congress: Biden’s Oct. 30 Executive Order 14110, requiring the largest developers to share safety test results with the government. It survived 14 months.

Making local strides

While Congress workshopped, New York City passed Local Law 144, requiring bias audits and notice before employers use algorithms to screen candidates, in July 2023. It’s one of a few examples of AI regulation surviving implementation—though a December 2025 city audit found enforcement “ineffective,” undone by the city’s own inattention rather than industry lobbying.

States moved next, and 2024 shows the industry’s playbook forming. Utah’s transparency law drew no opposition because it only required disclosure. Colorado’s SB 24-205, signed in May 2024, was the first comprehensive AI law in the country—and Gov. Jared Polis signed it while airing his own doubts.

In California, state Sen. Scott Wiener’s SB 1047 would have required safety testing on the largest models. Anthropic told Gov. Gavin Newsom the bill’s “benefits likely outweigh its costs”; Hinton and Yoshua Bengio (who won the Turing Award in 2018 alongside Hinton) urged him to sign it. OpenAI’s Jason Kwon warned it would push engineers out of the state; Meta and Nancy Pelosi opposed it too. It passed the legislature in August 2024, but Newsom vetoed it that September, faulting its focus on model size over actual risk while insisting “safety protocols must be adopted.”

Congress, meanwhile, found one uncontroversial thing to do: fund things. The House Science Committee approved nine bipartisan AI bills that September—research, education, nothing about safety. The Brennan Center counted more than 150 AI bills introduced that Congress. None were enacted.

Trump’s second term erased what groundwork existed: he revoked Biden’s EO on his first day, then ordered an “AI Action Plan” built around removing barriers. Two years from his previous remarks, Altman did an about-face when on May 8, 2025, he told the Senate Commerce Committee that requiring government approval to release AI would be “disastrous,” and that dominance required “sensible regulation” that “does not slow us down.” The senators offered little pushback.

Rage against the machine

That season produced the biggest federal AI move in years, but it was far from a safety bill. Sen. Ted Cruz inserted language into the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that would have barred every state from enforcing any AI law for 10 years, freezing more than a thousand state bills at once. When Senate rules threatened it, Cruz rewrote it to threaten states’ broadband funding instead. Seventeen Republican governors asked for it to be stripped. On July 1, 2025, the Senate voted 99–1 to remove it, with only Sen. Thom Tillis dissenting.

In September, California enacted SB 53. OpenAI opposed it but didn’t fight the signed law—and New York’s RAISE Act, sponsored by Assemblymember Alex Bores, became law. OpenAI never formally opposed RAISE, but President Greg Brockman helped fund a super PAC, Leading the Future, alongside Andreessen Horowitz and Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale, that spent more than $7.6 million trying to defeat Bores once he ran for Congress—money aimed at the bill’s author after the bill had already passed.

Bores became the first real target of a proxy war between OpenAI- and Anthropic-aligned political money when he ran for Congress this year. Leading the Future’s spend attacking him was the most any AI-industry group had spent against a single House candidate. Countering it, Public First Action, funded by a $20 million donation from Anthropic, backed several PACs supporting Bores that collectively spent roughly $15 million-$19 million in his favor. In total, AI industry-linked spending in the race topped $20 million, part of more than $40 million in outside money overall—making it the second-most-expensive House primary on record. Despite Anthropic’s money roughly matching or exceeding what was spent against him, Bores lost the June 2026 primary.

“Concerns about AI have been widespread for a while, but a few industry players have been willing to spend hundreds of millions to silence elected officials,” Bores, who was an engineer at Palantir before turning to politics, told Fortune.

Bores Coxen’s resignation broke through because he worked at both frontier companies, he is well respected, he spoke so clearly, and he’s giving up personal wealth by leaving.

Coxen’s resignation couldn’t be silenced. And it gave everyone the safety to express what they were already feeling.”

Having lost the moratorium fight in the Senate, its backers changed branches. By November 2025, House leadership reportedly eyed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) as a second vehicle; that produced no rider. Instead, on Dec. 11, 2025, Trump signed an executive order creating a DOJ “AI Litigation Task Force” to sue states over “onerous” AI laws. Where Cruz needed 60 votes and got one, this needed a signature. Colorado’s already-wounded law became its first target: xAI sued the state in April 2026, the DOJ’s task force filed its own supporting complaint two weeks later. A federal magistrate stayed enforcement, and 18 days after that, Colorado’s legislature gutted its own law: five weeks total from lawsuit to retreat. Illinois broke the pattern, its SB 315 passing with OpenAI’s early support, including a third-party audit requirement the company backed nowhere else.

A separate rebellion built over data centers rather than safety: Texas’s Greg Abbott, Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, New York’s Kathy Hochul and Arizona’s Katie Hobbs all moved to pause development over the summer of 2026, driven by voter anger over electricity and water costs. Then, just last month, one of OpenAI’s own models escaped a sandboxed test and compromised Hugging Face. Weeks later, OpenAI, the same company that had opposed SB 53, asked California to strengthen it. Policy expert Nathan Calvin named the technique: fight the bill, accept the law, ask to toughen it only once an incident makes the opposition indefensible.

A new bill that could wipe the slate clean

Coxon’s resignation lands in this near-decade-long record. Within 48 hours, Sen. Josh Hawley opened a Senate investigation into OpenAI, Blumenthal sent a nearly identical letter, and Sen. Bernie Sanders convened a bipartisan briefing with Hinton while Rep. Ro Khanna proposed more legislation. Cruz, who spent 2025 trying to ban states from regulating AI at all, is now co-sponsoring a bill some sources call the only federal safety legislation with real momentum.

Cruz joins Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Majority Leader John Thune in a new, bipartisan AI safety bill that would give the Commerce Department and Homeland Security real power to police the most powerful AI models. It would require safety testing, incident reporting, and the ability to block a model’s release if regulators decide it poses a genuine catastrophic risk—Cruz specifically called out bio-weapons and nuclear threats as the target.

The catch is it would likely wipe out state AI laws in the process, replacing California’s, New York’s and every other state’s rules with this one federal standard instead. Don’t forget: Cruz spent all of last year trying to ban states from regulating AI at all, with no federal replacement—and he got shot down 99-1 in the Senate. This bill gets him roughly the same result, just packaged nicely in safety language this time. Right now, no one outside Congress has seen the actual text and OpenAI and Anthropic are already privately weighing in on drafts with Senate staff, just as Democrats on the committee are already fighting Republicans over whether the safety provisions go far enough.

Maybe it really took Coxon’s resignation letter to get the ball rolling. “Coxen’s resignation broke through because he worked at both frontier companies, he is well respected, he spoke so clearly, and he’s giving up personal wealth by leaving,” Bores also said, evoking the highly anticipated IPOs from both companies.

Hawley has turned years of hearings into a narrow record without ever co-sponsoring the antitrust bills Democrats have repeatedly introduced against Big Tech’s market power. Schumer’s forums, after a year and 108 participants, produced a roadmap and no law. Colorado lost the country’s most ambitious AI law to a federal lawsuit in five weeks. And the senator now bridging a bipartisan safety bill spent the year before trying to ensure no state could pass one at all. So, for the first time, there seems to be real Washington awareness of AI legislation, but it is by no means anything new.

“Coxen’s resignation couldn’t be silenced,” Bores ended. “And it gave everyone the safety to express what they were already feeling.”