The call on Wednesday from OpenAI's chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane comes amid growing talk of lawmakers drawing up rules in the U.S. Congress, where passing regulations targeting the tech industry remains a major challenge amid heavy lobbying and political contributions from the companies.
In a policy statement, the ChatGPT maker said voluntary commitments by AI developers were no longer adequate, and urged U.S. lawmakers to act before Congress adjourns in December.
The call came as fears over the impact of AI have grown in recent weeks, after the revelation that powerful OpenAI technology operating outside human supervision had broken into Hugging Face, a repository of AI models.
This was followed by other alarming reports of AI technology slipping out of human control at rival Anthropic and other companies.
Fears were further stoked by a viral social media post by Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who said he was quitting the industry, accusing both U.S. AI giants of "gambling with our lives" in the race to develop AI models capable of self-improvement.
