WASHINGTON—U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Monday wrote a Substack post sounding the alarm on the existential risks unregulated artificial intelligence pose to America’s economy and collective well-being. Murphy advocated for strong government policy and intervention to ensure that citizens, rather than corporate interests, are managing the transformational effects of this new technology and protected from the worst of its potential harms.

“A fraud is being perpetuated on the American people and our pliant, gullible political leaders.” Murphy wrote. “If America does not protect its economy and culture from the potential ravages of advanced AI, our nation will rot from the inside out, giving China a free lane to pass us politically and economically.”

Murphy stressed that unregulated AI will ship jobs overseas, permanently hollow out the American job market, and leave workers with no recourse: “The job displacement will be massive and devastating. That’s just common sense… Not enough jobs will be created to replace the jobs we lose, and even the new jobs likely won’t stay in the United States due to the industry’s insatiable desire to maximize profits… the industry doesn’t really care about creating U.S.-based infrastructure or jobs. They are hunting profits, and to boost return on investment, without any guardrails imposed on them by government, they will use the same labor arbitrage techniques that other industries utilize and ship as many AI jobs as they can to countries with lower labor costs.”

Speaking from discussions with industry leaders, Murphy slammed the tech companies’ reckless disregard for the human impact of their technology: “The only value that guides the AI industry right now is the pursuit of profit. In all my meetings, it was crystal clear that companies like Google and Apple and OpenAI and Anthropic are in a race to deploy consumer-facing, job-killing AGI as quickly as possible, in order to beat each other to the market. Any talk about ethical or moral AI is just whitewash… They are in such a hurry that they can’t even explain how the large language models they are marketing come to conclusions or synthesize data. Every single executive I met with admitted that they had built a machine that they could not understand or control.”

Murphy pushed back against the common argument that targeted regulations would undercut innovation and enable China to win the AI race: “This argument assumes, wrongly, that the Chinese will put no constraints on the development and dissemination of their own AI models. We know this isn’t true because as we speak, China is being relatively careful with how it develops and rolls out AI. From 2021 to 2023, China began to build out a governance framework with some of the world’s earliest AI regulations and technical standards, bringing service providers into compliance on issues from ethics, data protection, safety, and security…That China has been actively building towards a national AI law, while producing a cutting-edge model like DeepSeek’s, makes clear that AI regulation and innovation can, and do, co-exist.” 

Murphy concluded: “I want to beat China in the race for advanced AI. I do. But not at any cost. If we do not use government policy and intervention to control for the job loss and to protect consumers, it won’t matter that we get to AGI before China. Unbounded, AGI could eliminate so many jobs and undermine so many of our values, that China will cheer our decision to rush to AGI in our blind, feverish desire to be first. Ultimately, China could end up winning the race, because we destroy ourselves along the race route.”