California congressman on potential AI misuse and AI Force

(CBS, KYMA) - Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) spoke with Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation Sunday about potential misuse of artificial intelligence (AI).

According to Brennan, Rep. Khanna proposed an idea that Chinese AI firms should cooperate with U.S. companies as the two countries are in an AI arms race.

Brennan also said the congressman sent letters to DeepSeek, Alibaba and other firms to urge them to follow the leads of their U.S. counterparts like OpenAI and Anthropic to slow the rate of AI advancement until society develops guardrails.

When asked if any of the Chinese firms responded to his proposal, Khanna said:

"They have not. Winning an AI war is like winning a nuclear war. It is catastrophic for civilization. And what we have asked is that they agree to some basic terms. Look, there are two dangers to AI: either the loss of control or misuse, and the Chinese firms have taken no actions on either of them."

Brennan followed up by saying federal agencies, like the FBI, NSA and Homeland Security, are warning that China-based AI companies are targeting and copying U.S. AI "at what they describe as an industrial scale."

This prompted her to ask how he can ask competitors to collaborate, and if it is inherently at odds if they're stealing technology, to which the congressman said:

"They're right that they are engaging in distillation. Basically, they are copying American models. That's one reason, frankly, to regulate American models because they're copying them. Some of the safeguards would protect the world, but at the same time, we also need an international agreement with Xi Jinping to have basic standards. That should include international monitoring, it should include checks through the data centers where you can tell whether a model is being used for inference or training, and it should use enforceable and verifiable tools. Now, obviously, you can't just trust the Chinese, but like any agreement, like an arms control agreement, as Reagan said, you need to trust and verify. And the world has done this before. There's no reason we can't do it when it comes to AI."

During the interview, Brennan and Khanna talked about President Donald Trump posting to social media saying he plans to create an AI czar and form the AI Force, like he did with forming the Space Force.

This led Brennan to ask why he couldn't just have Cyber Command handle it, and what does the executive branch or Congress actually have to do, and Khanna said:

"We need to set up an AI agency like the FDA. I mean, I don't know what President Trump's vision is. I don't know if he's using AI in an offensive capability, which would give me a lot of pause, especially because when you have things like the shooting of the Iranian school, where you had AI information basically feed something into a general, and then you had pro-forma sign off. That gives me concern. What I'm talking about is what Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, has said, which is that this can be regulated like we regulate nuclear energy, electricity, aviation, have independent technical experts make sure AI is safe. And...one of the things that really annoys me is when you have these tech CEOs out there saying, 'Oh, this is too complicated. People in Washington don't understand this.' Give me a break. We have regulated very complex things. We know we can appoint independent, smart people from universities. This is not complicated. We need to have an independent federal agency."

To watch more of Brennan's interview with Khanna, click here.