"What Washington Says About AGI" by zroe1

"What Washington Says About AGI" by zroe1

Author: LessWrong January 20, 2026 Duration: 14:16
LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
TechnologyCulturePhilosophySocietySociety & Culture
I spent a few hundred dollars on Anthropic API credits and let Claude individually research every current US congressperson's position on AI. This is a summary of my findings.

Disclaimer: Summarizing people's beliefs is hard and inherently subjective and noisy. Likewise, US politicians change their opinions on things constantly so it's hard to know what's up-to-date. Also, I vibe-coded a lot of this.

Methodology

I used Claude Sonnet 4.5 with web search to research every congressperson's public statements on AI, then used GPT-4o to score each politician on how "AGI-pilled" they are, how concerned they are about existential risk, and how focused they are on US-China AI competition. I plotted these scores against GovTrack ideology data to search for any partisan splits.

1. AGI awareness is not partisan and not widespread

Few members of Congress have public statements taking AGI seriously. For those that do, the difference is not in political ideology. If we simply plot the AGI-pilled score vs the ideology score, we observe no obvious partisan split.

There are 151 congresspeople who Claude could not find substantial quotes about AI from. These members are not included on this plot or any of the plots which follow.

[...]

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Outline:

(00:46) Methodology

(01:12) 1. AGI awareness is not partisan and not widespread

(01:56) 2. Existential risk is partisan at the tails

(02:51) 3. Both parties are fixated on China

(04:02) 4. Who in Congress is feeling the AGI?

(11:10) 5. Those who know the technology fear it.

(12:54) Appendix: How to use this data

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
January 16th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WLdcvAcoFZv9enR37/what-washington-says-about-agi

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Four panels showing politicians at different speaking events and hearings.
Scatter plot titled
Scatter plot titled

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