YouSaid · the spoken record
Maria Cantwell
We hold 53 passages that may be Maria Cantwell’s. We do not publish them until we can confirm who spoke. See the correction.
On the record 2024–2026
congress · podcast
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“And I want to thank Senator Booker for working with me for many, many years on this issue, and that doesn't mean that he still doesn't have reservations, but it means that he is committed to this issue writ large. But we do see a different conclusion here tonight. And I want to thank my colleagues for passing a bill out of committee and now getting it to this threshold because, unlike my colleagues' comments before, there are several things in this bill that are really important to enshrine into Federal law at this time. First and foremost, the Federal right to NIL and making sure that it is not State laws that have been quite onerous on athletes--that is, laws that say if you conflict with your university, your university wins and if you conflict with other issues, you don't get NIL. So creating a Federal standard is very important.”
Senate28 September 2026Source ↗
“Madam President, I know the floor has been busy this afternoon with people discussing the Protect College Sports Act, and I want to thank all my colleagues for participating in a debate. That is what this institution is supposed to be about. It is supposed to be about an amendment process, and it is supposed to be about a product that comes out of committee, and it is supposed to be about our colleagues showing up. So I want to thank my colleagues, particularly Senator Booker and Senator Murphy, who came to the floor to express their views on this bill. I want to thank both of them. You know, I certainly agree with Senator Murphy on his long-standing effort to think about collective bargaining in college sports. He has been very outspoken on that for many years.”
Senate28 September 2026Source ↗
“Reserving the right to object, can we modify that and ask for an additional 20 minutes so the Senator from Texas and I can also be heard?”
Senate28 September 2026Source ↗
“I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.”
Senate22 September 2026Source ↗
“So we are going to continue to work through our colleagues on that but continue to push forward on the very challenging environment that college education is facing and the huge amounts of add-on fees that they are adding to nonstudent-athletes to pay for athletics, taking money out of a general fund to pay for athletics--basically, taking out an endowment to pay for athletics. The majority of these are not even making money anymore for themselves. So we have to bring some order to the system, and I urge my colleagues to continue to improve the situation so that we are not balancing the books on behalf of larger education just for sports but that they have a system that will work for all of us. So I encourage my colleagues to continue the dialogue with us, and I hope that we can move forward on this important legislation.”
Senate22 September 2026Source ↗
“I welcome that as part of a Commission requirement. We also did a few things to make sure that we are covering pending cases, that the underlying bill does not wipe out pending cases. And so we took language recommended by a variety of our athletes working on this prior to us even moving the bill out of committee, since the bill moved out of committee, and this, I think, helped us perfect this language to make sure that existing pending cases are not wiped out by our legislation. And it obviously also narrows the broad field of preemption provisions for eligibility to just those covered in this legislative section. So this legislation before us today continues to make improvements. As I said, I think there are about 15 or 20 amendments that were filed last week and maybe another 20-plus amendments filed today.”
Senate22 September 2026Source ↗
“1 in the world right now. I think I just saw that headline. But why can't the University of Washington promote their track and field if, in fact, their football Huskies contract, which--I would just say, I saw a lot of Big Ten football this weekend, trying to engage and understand, but you didn't see anything about the Huskies other than if you tried to watch that game. Why? Because nobody on the east coast even reports about what happens to west coast football. After a certain time, they just don't report about it. This bill is about trying to empower these other sports--particularly that drive women and Olympic sports--to make their own revenue streams. So one of our colleagues here wanted an improvement to the bill that said that students should even think about how to get a bigger financial stake. I welcome it.”
Senate22 September 2026Source ↗
“And it requires the Commission to study how and whether students should get a financial stake in their own teams. Now, this is a novel idea but something I think the Commission should consider. One of the things I am very proud of in the underlying bill is the fact that we say to broadcast entities who bid on college sports--most of the time just to show football or just to show basketball--that if you are not using your rights for those same institutions to help support other programs--like, say women's volleyball or track and field--that you have to allow that institution to come up with other ways that they might enhance their revenue by doing streaming media. Now, we think this is really important because we think there are a lot of great--I am very proud of, right now, that, I think, our UW women's pole vaulter is No.”
Senate22 September 2026Source ↗
“The substitute also includes a role for the House and Senate Education and Labor Committees in the selection of Commission members. It does this by requiring the House and Senate leadership and the Senate Commerce and House Energy and Commerce leadership to work with the Senate HELP and House Ed and Workforce leadership in appointing the members of the Commission. Now, this legislation does try to stabilize the college environment today as it relates to sports, but it also says we need to have a big discussion about how this continues to play out in the future. And this Commission needs to be well represented by a variety of interests. So we are very happy to add both HELP and House Education and Workforce leadership to be part of that.”
Senate22 September 2026Source ↗
“So this requires an institution to comply with the uniform benchmarks established by the Intercollegiate Athletic Association or conference related to graduation rates and the academic process of student-athletes in order to be eligible for this retention fund. So we are putting in more safeguards and accountability. If these institutions want to continue to have additional resources, they are going to have to prove that they are meeting academic performance. It prevents the NCAA from weakening its standards for qualifying as a full-time student by cross-referencing terms and definitions. So, again, there are lots of eyeballs on this legislation, and it is good because we are making and perfecting and ensuring that the language does what we think it does; and, if not, we are improving it by making changes.”
Senate22 September 2026Source ↗
“But as we continue to move through the legislative process on the Protect College Sports Act, we have sought to clarify and improve the bill in ways that make clear to our colleagues the intent of what the Senate Commerce Committee and now those here on the Senate floor have tried to achieve in this legislation. The substitute makes clear that medical coverage and healthcare and safety standards in the bill are a floor and not a ceiling. So it amends sections 106 and 107 to clarify that it cannot be construed to preclude provisions of additional medical coverage or establishment of additional health, wellness, and safety standards in the bill.”
Senate22 September 2026Source ↗
“Mr. President, I come to the floor because we are going to be voting shortly on two things this afternoon: one on a judicial nominee and, second, on cloture on the underlying substitute of the Protect College Sports Act. I just wanted to make sure that we were talking to colleagues about changes that were in that underlying substitute that we have been able to make. I think earlier today, at 3 or 3:30, was the deadline for filing amendments. So we obviously have been working all weekend and processing amendments that were filed last week, and now we will work on amendments that are filed this week and, hopefully, make progress with our colleagues on a bipartisan basis.”
Senate22 September 2026Source ↗
“So I don't know if you understand that $2.8 billion on behalf of athletes won in a settlement agreement is not a permanent right, but it will be after we pass this law.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“I am asking a question. I would respectfully say to my colleague, without the $2.8 billion record revenue-sharing agreement in what is called Grant House v. NCAA, there would not be revenue sharing. The Court has not recognized revenue sharing. If you read the decision by Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh said Congress can decide these are not employees and they do not deserve revenue. Kavanaugh's decision on NIL basically says: Congress, you can come back and say they don't deserve a damn thing. A settlement agreement by injured athletes basically got that right, but that settlement agreement is tedious and could fall apart. Our recognizing that money and recognizing the revenue-sharing rights is a historic first.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“Again, I appreciate the Senator from New Jersey's passion about this issue. As he knows, he and I have worked on this for more than 5 years, and since he has testified before the committee, I know he knows that this is not something that has just come up. And since he and I have put up a bill that was 75 percent of what this bill is, I know that he also knows there are good things in here. But I would say to my colleague--”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“Yes. Because the settlement agreement could expire, I am asking the Senator if he recognizes that us putting revenue sharing--the rights for an athlete to have a percentage of media, ticket sales, and sponsorship--is an important investment.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“And it is about making sure that we move forward on legislation instead of ignoring a problem that is sucking revenue right out of our institutions that should be going for cheaper tuition and should be going to keeping our most skilled academic leaders to help our Nation be competitive. I yield the floor.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“Let us not destroy the 500,000 athletes in our effort to just make sure that the 1 or 2 percent also get their financial due. Let's put rules in place and pass this important law and make sure of these protections. I know my colleagues are here, and I do want to emphasize--but maybe I will let them have their moment--how important the health and safety standards being met in this legislation are. They do allow you to take action. They do allow a State to basically help enforce these health and safety provisions. I know there's been a lot of people who say something counter to that, but trust me, this legislation is about protecting the athletes. It is about making sure they are not undermined.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“If these institutions and the athletes being represented in a settlement agreement can come to terms and make sure that we have rules in place, then we need to enshrine those rules in this legislation and move forward. If we do, our college athletics will be stabilized. Is this the end of this discussion? No. It is the beginning of how we continue to stabilize this. This bill also includes the future of sports Commission. The future of sports Commission, made up mostly of athletes, will discuss--once we get additional revenue into the system--how we can best protect athletes for the future and think of issues like collective bargaining or other issues that might help us best preserve this important--important--monumental contribution to our Nation.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“In 2025--the sports reporter Ross Dellenger--a total of 15 fired coaches in 2025 was $280 million. That is why we call this the Kiffin rule, to protect college sports. What this provision does is stop a coach from abandoning one college football team in the middle of a season and start working for another one. This is unacceptable behavior. So this important legislation is making progress. This 322-percent increase in recruitment costs is not about paying athletes. These athletes deserve revenue. These athletes deserve to have their NIL deals, but we do not need to go blind to either outrageous agent contracts or outrageous boosters trying to distort the market.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“This bill--thanks to the leadership, as I said, of Senator Lujan-- includes a provision that says schools with more than $80 million in athletic revenue cannot pay coaches or managers more than $500,000 unless it comes directly from donations or from the athletic department revenue. That means you can't take our taxpayer money, which is what people are doing--schools like Connecticut, schools in New Jersey, the Virginia schools, which basically have a record number of tuition costs--literally put on tuition for nonathletes--and basically you cannot do that to pay for exorbitant coaches' salaries. This bill also addresses the, frankly, outrageous practice of providing a golden parachute for fired coaches and, even if they were fired, cause their teams' loss and loss of games.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“But Senator Lujan did in committee, and we did implement it. In 2025, nine football FBS coaches were paid $10 million a year, more than $100 million annually. And at the top of the market, Kirby Smart was listed at roughly $13 million in annual school pay. Ohio State's Ryan Day was at $12.5 million--eight-figure salaries that would have been almost unimaginable a generation ago in college athletics. If you had a winning team, a lot more people might get notice about your school. You might want to go to that school. I get it. But we cannot have runaway costs on athletics and basically undermine the competitiveness for only the richest schools, in which the richest donors are able to compete.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“And, finally, a database will contain information about the revenues and expenditures with each sport at each school as well as the overage hours and academic outcomes for the student-athletes. So that means this bill will allow the public to see what is going on. This transparency will help us make athletic departments and their spending and this discussion much clearer. I want it to be clear because I am not for cutting university professors and having an arms race. I want to win the innovation race against China and make sure that we are investing. I want to thank my colleague Senator Lujan for his important piece of this legislation. There has been a lot of concern about skyrocketing coaches' salaries, and I welcome any amendment that anybody wants to offer on this, but so far no one has offered one that I know of.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“It is not about whether you have a billionaire in your backyard. It is about whether you can coach and recruit and develop and maintain and have academic performance and have fairness across the pages and have everybody compete and keep the ecosystem in place. But that fairness does not exist today without this bill, and people who don't want those rules--don't want those rules in place--to me, are hurting us in our overall efforts. Now, let me say something about transparency in this bill. This bill creates a public database with itemized information for all revenue sharing and NIL agreements over $600. The additional database will contain information on the total number of agreements, payments, average value of the agreements, payments on the total value of the agreements, payments on each sports program at the school.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“The reason the arms race exists is because there are rules on billionaires throwing money into the system without adhering to the settlement agreement. So, yes, our colleagues all work together to recognize the settlement agreements to help make sure that there are fair rules. I think it would be like saying: OK. Here in the U.S. Senate, let's just have each State say what members of your staff should be paid. Now, I might like that because in Washington, there are a lot of wealthy people, and I am pretty sure they could say: We could make a lot of money here representing the State of Washington. OK? But some other State--Mississippi--doesn't have a chance. And so I am going to move to proceed to this bill because I want these rules put in place because sports is about any given Saturday.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“And we are trying to help the poorest institutions meet these requirements--so medical coverage for out-of-pocket costs and helping with a $100 million fund for smaller schools to help with the significant costs that can occur in this legislation--in sports. So this is an important piece of legislation in protecting athletes. But we also have to protect the cost and the public besides women in Olympic sports. What we are seeing today is a record amount of taxpayer dollars and literally university professors being cut to pay for the unending arms race. In fact, Rutgers leads the charge, may have had 38 faculty members cut because--and people going to the institution, and they are part of the Big Ten.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“They haven't proven that they can have just recognition of these rights for athletes, but we can. We can put them into law. We can recognize them, enshrine them today, and make sure these athletes are protected forever--including the rights to not have their contracts screwed with, their rights to not have their school override them, the rights to have any amount of money that some business wants to pay them as long as it is for a valid business purpose. So these protections--along with the fact that they get a record 5 years of eligibility, 5 years of scholarship, 5 years of healthcare, and then 5 years after that on both of those--it is helping them for the future.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“This, alone, is constricting the unsavory behavior of these people, and they are the primary opposition to this bill. They are because they don't like that we are capping agent fees at 5 percent. We have to continue to make progress. Let me talk about what we are saying here about the wins in this bill as it relates to the rights of these athletes. As I said, it is a Federal recognition of NIL rights and revenue sharing, and it will be the first time that Congress, on record, is endorsing both of those. Now, I know that people think the Supreme Court decided and helped on NIL, but a court decision and a settlement agreement actually moved this along in what is called Grant House v. NCAA. That settlement agreement can disappear. That settlement agreement has had a very rough road over the last year.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“That is when I started paying attention to this issue. I am not going to have women in Olympic sports undermined by this system. In fact, there is a poll that shows that 87 percent of the public, when polled, what do they care about this issue, 87 percent agree women and Olympic sports need to be preserved because they know that is what is unique by the system. So we are not going to let runaway boosters, who basically want no rules, and runaway agents, who want to prey on high school kids, decide what is going to happen here. So we basically are making sure, as I said, that agents have to register. They have to have documentation. They cannot misrepresent themselves. They have to comply with both the FTC and the AG and, obviously, the NCAA.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“Hardscrabble workingmen--including a Jewish coxswain from Montesano, WA--went there and stuck it to Adolf Hitler and what a moment for the United States of America--what a moment, what a statement for our Nation because we participated and we won. But guess what is happening now. Thousands of those roster spots are being cut. Hundreds of those programs are being cut. I swore I wasn't going to focus on this issue if I ever got into a position on the committee, but when a kid from my State--written up by Eddie Pells from the AP--told the story of how at White Pass, WA, where the Mahre brothers had skied and went on to win gold, all of a sudden a snowboarder from White Pass, WA, couldn't get covered by the Olympic team because there was no revenue. And he went and he snowboarded for Russia, and he won medals.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“So let me go over this for a second, starting with women and Olympic sports. I became very moved by the story of college and Olympic sports. In fact, I am glad to see Senator McConnell back on the Senate floor because he and I have been having this conversation now for about 3 or 4 years. He kept saying to me: Maria, what are you going to do to protect women in Olympic sports? Why? Because when the United States doesn't shine at the Olympics, then guess what. The United States doesn't shine. And I am so proud to represent the State of Washington and to know this historic story of the ``Boys in the Boat,'' who basically fought everything that people threw at them--threw at them, basically rearranging lanes, threw at them all sorts of difficulties. But guess what.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“We are not interested in having some 27-year-old pro college player beating up on a 19-year-old who is basically just entering his college academic career. And, yes, we have regulations on agents, agents who now like to call themselves athlete advocates. It is just a euphemism because what they really want is money. They are taking advantage of high school athletes, making them sign a contract, and then repossessing their cars--this is what Coach Bowles has told us--when they can't get them an NIL deal. We allow for the prosecution of misrepresentation by agents, by the FTC, and our attorneys general. And we continue to put the language into the bill that makes sure that only legitimate deals recognized in the settlement agreement, based on market value, are recognized so we can bring stability to this situation.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“It does constrict coaches and where the money for coaches can come from--not from taxpayers--but, instead, making sure that they continue to only receive from endowments or other revenue. It makes sure that there is transparency in the law because right now the problem with the rising costs in college athletics is not the fact that we were willing to pay athletes because we said: Here, we are enshrining in law for the first time NIL rights and athletes' revenue rights. But what we are not going to put up with is booster backdoors that basically inflate with no rationale for why and where the money is coming from. We are bringing transparency to the system. We are also saying you can't go back. You can't play in the pros and go back to college.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“It has a $900,000 authorization for Black colleges to help them and their broadcasting of sports be more competitive for the future. It has whistleblower protections, including first-time ever whistleblowing protection for title IX. It grants athletes scholarship and health protections for the 5 years that they are in their college academic environment and for the 5 years after that. It protects the future of college sports by creating a Commission made up of athletes to talk about how we move forward on issues like collective bargaining, revenue sharing, and making sure that we don't see more cuts. It basically puts transfer sensibility into law so that it makes sure that we are keeping students focused on academics and education.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“While we are very happy that there is a first Federal law recognizing revenue sharing and recognizing NIL rights, we also have to understand that there are lots of athletes--500,000 athletes--that are part of this ecosystem, and we care a lot about the women in Olympic sports, and we don't want to see those slots cut, which is exactly what has been happening. It requires college sports to make content available, not behind a paywall. If there is nothing else in this bill that you should vote for, you should show your anger at the fact that your favorite college sport content keeps getting put behind a paywall, and somebody is making you pay for it. This says that that content needs to be available to you regionally, in your local area.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“First and foremost, it recognizes in a Federal law that athletes deserve not only NIL--which is name, image, and likeness--rights and to protect those rights, but athletes deserve to have revenue sharing. This is so critical, and I will expound on it in a while. It also gives athletes 5 years of eligibility for the first time, which is historic in us giving that at the Federal level. It requires women to have the same comprehensive standards as men do, when you are talking about championships and playoffs. It preserves women and in Olympic roster slots that are the large percentage of athletes that we are trying to protect in this bill.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“Mr. President, I rise today to urge my colleagues to proceed in continuing an important discussion on the Protect College Sports Act. This historic, sweeping legislation, formed in a bipartisan fashion by my colleagues Senator Schmitt, the Presiding Officer, Senator Coons, Senator Welch, Senator Capito, Senator Hickenlooper, Senator Ricketts, Senator Lujan, Senator Hoeven, and Senator Cruz and myself, is a bipartisan effort to try to bring some reason to the craziness that has basically been plaguing the most important aspects of college sports. This legislation is historic in the fact that it puts into law 12-- more than a dozen, I should say--important provisions that help athletes and protect them for the future.”
Senate17 September 2026Source ↗
“There is going to be a moment when the United States is standing at the Olympics, and we are not going to be winning gold or silver or bronze because we are not going to have the athletes because the collegiate system will have collapsed, and people won't be funding them because they will be in an arms race over football. Let's bring some sanity, recognize that athletes do deserve revenue sharing, and that this bill will put that into law for the first time-- the first-time athletes will get a Federal preemption on NIL rights and revenue sharing that will be historic. Let's move forward. I yield the floor.”
Senate15 September 2026Source ↗
“This bill brings order to this, it helps women's and Olympic sports, and it sets up a commission to look at the real future, which I think should include collective bargaining, for what college sports can be organized in the future. But none of that can happen, and the 500,000 athletes that are at risk--because thousands of them have already been cut from the system-- are just going to continue to see failure. The other night, I talked to the Pac-12 commissioner, who said: I just met with all the student-athletes in the Pac-12. She said: You know what the No. 1 question I got from those student- athletes was? I said: No. What? They wanted to know whether their sport was still going to be there.”
Senate15 September 2026Source ↗
“Pass the Protect College Sports Act, in the Senate this fall and in the House right behind it. Student-athletes need protection, universities need a sustainable system, and our HBCUs deserve this investment. The time to act is now. Mr. President, this letter that I just read from Lamell McMorris I think is a representative of all the issues combined in this legislation. I can just tell you that the unsustainable 300-percent increase in recruiting student-athletes without the proper rules and regulations is bankrupting our higher education system. Taxpayers are asked to foot the bill in higher tuition fees that students pay who are not even athletes. They are going to State legislatures and asking for bailouts, and they are using university funds that should go to research and putting them, instead, into what is an arms race.”
Senate15 September 2026Source ↗
“At a place like Morehouse, home to a sports-journalism program founded with Spike Lee, that money is generational. I do not dismiss the people opposing this bill; several are friends and allies. The NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus have tied it to the fight over Black voting power. Let me be clear: Voting rights are sacred, and I will stand in that fight with anyone. But I cannot agree that the way to wage it is to hold thousands of student-athletes' scholarships, health protections and futures hostage to a Supreme Court decision they did not make. Let us fight for voting rights with everything we have, and let us not make these young people the collateral. The other objection, pressed by organized labor, is that collective bargaining should fix all of this. I wish it were that simple.”
Senate15 September 2026Source ↗
“Others push players into the transfer portal chasing an offer that never comes, and more than 40% of transfers each year risk losing their scholarships and support. I know this business. It is not built around the best interests of student-athletes, and this bill finally brings order to it. The legislation sets national rules everyone plays by. It protects Olympic and nonrevenue sports, invests in women's athletics, strengthens health and safety, safeguards scholarships, and creates real accountability for schools and athletes alike. And it directs nearly a billion dollars over the next six years into HBCUs, through the IGNITE investment in HBCU sports, media, journalism and broadband. It is why the United Negro College Fund and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, along with more than 360 schools and every major conference, support it.”
Senate15 September 2026Source ↗
“I have spent my [whole] career on both sides of a table that rarely agree, as the founder of a sports agency representing athletes, including a No. 1 overall NFL draft pick, and as a graduate of Morehouse College who loves our historically Black institutions. From both chairs, I can tell you the status quo is unsustainable, and the Protect College Sports Act is the best chance we have to fix it. Let me say something my former colleagues will not like. The agent world around these young athletes is largely unregulated, and too much of it preys on the very [young] kids it claims to serve. In the pros, agent fees are capped around 5%; in college, some agents reportedly take 20-25% of an athlete's NIL deal.”
Senate15 September 2026Source ↗
“This is Lamell McMorris, a graduate of Morehouse College and, for two decades, he worked at the intersection of sports and politics, entertainment, community engagement, and business. He serves as the vice chair of the National Urban League board of trustees, a board member of the National Action Network, and a former board member of the NAACP. But these views that he is expressing here--it was published yesterday--are his own. So I am quoting from him in his letter: College sports are in a free fall, and everyone inside the game knows it. Universities are borrowing and spending tens of millions just to keep up, while nonrevenue, women's and Olympic sports are cut to feed football and men's basketball. Courts, not campuses, increasingly decide who plays and where. Smaller schools have become unpaid development leagues for the giants.”
Senate15 September 2026Source ↗
“Mr. President, there is a lot to say in a short period of time, but we will be having a vote soon to move to proceed to the Protect College Sports Act, a bill that does deserve the attention of this institution. There are lots of things I would like to focus on. I didn't necessarily call the shot that we were having this vote, but, I will tell you, it is definitely worth proceeding to. The importance of protecting college sports is about us working in a bipartisan basis with a variety of Members on both sides of the aisle and working with universities across the United States in every conference and thousands of athletes who want to have a better system. I think the best thing I can do is to read from a business sports article by a key individual, and so I am going to do that.”
Senate15 September 2026Source ↗
“Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that Senator Cruz and myself be permitted to speak for up to 5 minutes each prior to the scheduled rollcall vote.”
Senate15 September 2026Source ↗
“And now the very dangers we have warned about--autonomous cyber attacks and biological weapons--are no longer theoretical. It is time that we act and act aggressively. We must keep in mind that these AI models consistently lag about only 7 months, and the most powerful open models continue to come from China. So it is time for my colleagues to come together to act. We know that these threats are real--cyber security, misinformation-- building on these AI agents that could be used in military applications. We need our colleagues to say ``Stop saying the industry can do what it wants'' and put together the infrastructure at the Federal level that not only has strong Federal standards but also has independent testing and real safeguards for the American people. Now is the time to act. I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.”
Senate14 September 2026Source ↗
“Three years ago, we had a chance to get ahead of this issue. In 2024, when I chaired the Senate Commerce Committee, we passed the Future of Artificial Intelligence Innovation Act, which would have given the Federal Government the ability to work with industry to independently test most advanced AI systems for serious national security risk. Now, some of these risks may not have been apparent in the last 2 years, but we would have stood up the muscle of our organization at the Federal level to better detect risks like cyber attacks; risks like chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons; or threats to our current infrastructure and our energy systems.”
Senate14 September 2026Source ↗
“Well, he said: Under our Preparedness Framework, a model reaches this Critical cybersecurity threshold if it can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all security levels in many hardened real-world critical systems without human intervention, or can devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal. Well, nevertheless, on September 3, OpenAI released Astra with the addition of certain security guardrails. Then, in response to Dario's essay calling for extreme caution and a slowdown, he tweeted: ``I agree with Dario.'' So the problem here is we have a bunch of people within the industry calling out what are these technology developments, but we--we--need to do something about this. We need to be better informed. We need to do more.”
Senate14 September 2026Source ↗
“He goes on to say: Given the accelerating rate of AI capability . . . it's my worry that in 6-12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing . . . billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails. So, on August 7, after the Hugging Face incident was first revealed, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, spoke about the company's upcoming release, known as Astra. He claimed that it attained what OpenAI called critical cyber security threshold.”
Senate14 September 2026Source ↗