FOX News host Laura Ingraham discusses the artificial intelligence regulation debate and its potential impact on the 2026 midterm elections on “The Ingraham Angle.”

LAURA INGRAHAM, FOX NEWS HOST: First, the midterm fear-mongers. That’s the focus of tonight’s Angle. Now, the media coverage all day long sounded like it was written by an A.I. prompt. Please draft a script that scares the hell out of the American people. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) KASIE HUNT, CNN ANCHOR: Have we basically sleepwalked into a crisis? Like, is that as far as this has gotten now? SEN. CHRIS COONS (D-DE): Well, Kasie, it’d be hard to say we’re sleepwalking when we’re actively running into a crisis. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president is lashing out today at facts he does not like. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: As the A.I. pioneers say, slow down. President Trump wants the industry to speed up. UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are we ready? Are our elected leaders ready? Are we to think that A.I. is in any better position than the war in Iran or the economy? (END VIDEO CLIP) INGRAHAM: Well, I don’t know about that, but President Trump is going to kill us all. Now, this reminded me of one of the you know really the first several months of COVID hysteria, but I’m not here tonight to try to minimize the complexity of A.I., the power of A.I. that would be ridiculous, or frankly the need for a deliberate approach to this awesome power. Obviously, when bitter rivals Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei all agree that the A.I. industry needs to pace itself. The warning is bound to get everyone’s attention, and we’ve all heard the amazing stuff like A.I. inventing new antibiotics and giving everyone their own chief of staff. But lately, the scary side of A.I. has dominated the media landscape. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The thing that they’re trying to do, the only thing that justifies the amount of investment that these companies are taking, is to build artificial general intelligence, which means to be able to replace every human worker in the economy. (END VIDEO CLIP) INGRAHAM: No jobs, that would be very bad. But I don’t blame anyone for freaking out hearing that, especially those new law school grads, that’s going to be a lot easier to do with A.I. and software engineers. Software is already being written by A.I. And last week, a 27-year-old researcher who quit Anthropic somehow single-handedly drove the news cycle, literally pushing a science fiction nightmare into the public consciousness. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: People who are very used to computers might think it’s kind of crazy that a computer could wipe them out, but it doesn’t look that different from, say, Terminator or from science fiction films. It really is just if you have a super advanced intelligence, it could — it will be smart enough to kill us, and concrete examples might be, it could — we can’t just unplug it because it could be copying itself over to other computers. (END VIDEO CLIP) INGRAHAM: Remember War Games, that movie is exactly can’t turn it on — can’t turn it off. It’s always on, and you turn on any TV show today, it was nonstop fear-mongering. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now imagine you have an A.I. that’s running your bio laboratory, which is not that far away, having an A.I. that is in control of a biological robots. (END VIDEO CLIP) INGRAHAM: And within a matter of hours, this issue becomes what looks to be a well-coordinated effort by some Democrats to demoralize voters, drive down the stock market, and help defeat Republicans. Now, the first sign of this was when Obama got in the mix. His fingerprints are all over this, urging Democrats. And what we were told, I love this, was a private fundraiser. Except his people released a partial transcript of a private fundraiser that where he basically urged them to make A.I. a central issue in their campaigns, looking at Hakeem Jeffries, Obama said, once your speaker, I would strongly urge that the Democrats put together a framework for a very public conversation. This is something that’s moving very fast in private hands, and if we don’t get on top of it, I think it can be dangerous. If we do get on top of it, I think it’s beneficial. Hakeem had his marching orders. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) REP. HAKEEM JEFFRIES (D-NY): We need to act urgently. We should take decisive action now so that we can slow down, as the CEOs have recently acknowledged, slow down the pace of development in order to protect the American people and ensure that A.I. is proceeding safely. (END VIDEO CLIP) INGRAHAM: He wants this as kind of his calling card that he needs to be Speaker of the House because with the Democrats as the majority party writing the rules for A.I., what could possibly go wrong? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe think about how well they handled the COVID lockdowns, their rules against oil exploration, their handling of immigration. Heck, they even managed to damage the Smithsonian Institution with their anti-American bias. Plus, the reality here is this, China is already in the A.I. race, and they’re going to do whatever they want, regardless of our pronouncements and benevolent goals. So, until someone convinces me that it’s better for China to take over the world. I assume it’s better for us to beat China in the A.I. race. If this technology is as dangerous, and they say, and for the sake of this argument, we’ll say yes, it is, and if it’s as destructive as they say, then we absolutely cannot allow China to have what would be ultimately totalitarian monopoly on the guts of this industry. If the major players want to have a serious conversation about how to approach this with specific, detailed rules that would make life better in the United States, then sure, let’s have that conversation, no problem. But watching the coverage of this issue today, it seems pretty obvious what’s going on here, right down to Jon Ossoff jumping in. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) SEN. JON OSSOFF (D-GA): This week we were warned again of existential risk to the human species. A capable president would move swiftly to secure and reassure the American people, rush inspectors into frontier labs, fortify the nation against bioterrorism, demand legislation from Congress and lead the world toward an A.I. treaty. (END VIDEO CLIP) INGRAHAM: An A.I. treaty, a global treaty. You see where this is going, right? Remember, we were told that atomic bombs would destroy the world in the late ’40s, and Robert Oppenheimer bared his soul about the weapon he helped create. Then, film after film was made in America, especially in the 70s, 80s, and even the 90s, trying to terrify America into giving up our nuclear capabilities. The same argument we’re hearing today about A.I. was used against atomic energy as well. Look, it could be used for great good or great harm. Fear-mongering about climate change, same thing. Al Gore’s film, Inconvenient Truth. Oh, my God, that still echoes in politics today. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ (D-NY): Millennials and people, and you know Gen Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up, and we’re like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change. And your biggest issue is — your biggest issue is how are we going to pay for it? (END VIDEO CLIP) INGRAHAM: Now I understand that Democrats may want us to agree on some sort of global deal with China, and Chinese President Xi is going to be in Washington in a few weeks. But again, even if that could work, that’s going to take a long time to negotiate, and it’s not at all clear that we could trust China to live up to its end of the bargain anyway, why would they? So this would all make us extremely vulnerable in the United States, and the sad question I think we all have to confront is, is it already too late to do heavy regulation on the federal level of the type that’s being bandied about today? And for everyone who says it’s irresponsible and selfish for us not to take these concerns seriously, well, I guess it was selfish as well in the 1980s when they said we were going to die from a nuclear holocaust. They wanted us to disarm unilaterally, and then lead the world in nuclear disarmament. The No Nukes movement was powerful, used relentlessly against Reagan. Thank God he didn’t listen to them. It was peace through strength, and we won the Cold War. And overtime though, we did come up with a regulatory framework around nuclear power, nuclear weapons, which made sense, but right now this is a national security issue as well. Starting in 1999, some of us were warning against letting China develop the biggest industrial base in the world. We were ignored. Of course, the A.I. companies here in the U.S. can always voluntarily slow down their research. Anthropic is taking step one in its list of three steps. They could testify on Capitol Hill about suggested paths for us to go forward. No problem. But on X today, Trump’s former A.I. czar David Sacks posted this, I don’t see what you see in the lab if the unreleased models are scary enough that you could think that you should slow down. I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Interesting. And President Trump, for his own part in this, used the words hoax and sick conspiracy to describe these most recent A.I. concerns, and said that smart presidential leadership are all the guardrails A.I. needs. Well, today was ideal, though, wasn’t it, for the Democrats and their quest to take the House and the Senate? They need Americans to be depressed and scared before November, and so when Trump comes out and rejects the idea of knee-jerk A.I. slowdowns, he becomes the instant boogeyman here. But it’s incumbent upon everyone to take a breath, look at the big picture, examine motives, political, financial motives, both of them, and proceed with caution. A.I. does pose great risks and some important benefits. We should take this moment seriously. But weakening America’s position in the world will do nothing to ensure that things don’t spin out of control. We know Democrats prefer global governance to national sovereignty. Look at what they did with the border. So let’s not allow them to use A.I. fear as their latest excuse for taking us there. And that’s the Angle.

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