Ro Khanna Presses US Intelligence and Chinese AI Firms on Catastrophic AI Risks

Rep. Ro Khanna has sent letters to a US intelligence agency and to three Chinese AI companies—DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot AI—requesting information on their preparedness for catastrophic AI incidents and their efforts toward superintelligence.

In the letter to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Khanna asked the agency to assess how effectively the US could respond to an AI lab losing control of its bots. He also requested an evaluation of the Chinese government's approach to assessing catastrophic AI risks.

The letters to the Chinese companies seek documentation on their efforts toward superintelligence and recursive self-improvement, safeguards and kill switches, and possible inspections by a non-governmental agency under a treaty. Khanna said he wants a US-China treaty banning RSI and monitoring frontier AI labs.

Khanna gave an interview to The Verge on Monday about the letters. In them, he cited a summer incident in which OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face.

The letters come amid broader discussions on AI policy. Last week, Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump met at the White House and agreed to discuss AI. The morning of that meeting, Trump posted on Truth Social about Super Intelligence. A meeting between the White House, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and several American tech executives was planned for Tuesday. Johnson said on Fox Business that he expected the conversation to focus on striking the right balance of oversight without stifling innovation.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has called for an AI treaty between the US and China. House China Committee Chair John Moolenaar has been skeptical that the Chinese government would keep its end of a bargain.