The United States Capitol dome by night, Washington DC, 2019. Photo by Darren Halstead on Unsplash.The leaders of the major frontier AI developers are sounding the alarm at the speed at which AI is creating potential catastrophic risk, calling for a slowdown and government regulation. But Congress and the president are far from consensus on government’s role. Congress is unprepared and needs to devote serious attention to legislative options. As it does, it should quickly establish a bipartisan public-private AI Commission to define solutions for responding to public alarm and industry warnings.There is precedent for using a Commission to build rapid consensus in response to a radical change in the threats at hand. The end of the Cold War was one such moment. The terrorist attack of September 11 was another. In each case, the existing machinery of the US government had been built for a world that no longer existed. The moment required a clear-eyed rethinking of government's role itself, at a speed government rarely manages.We are in such a moment now. The people building artificial intelligence — the engineers, researchers, and executives who understand the technology best — are the ones sounding the loudest alarms. That is not normal. Industries do not typically lobby for their own regulation or warn that their products could cause catastrophic harm. When this happens, the debate about whether government needs to act should be over. What remains are the hard questions: what…

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