By U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal 

Sam was 19 years old when a chatbot let him die. Like many college students, Sam was curious about substances, and he turned to ChatGPT for advice on how to use them responsibly. The chatbot he confided in lured him in, became his best friend who was available 24/7, fed him false and dangerous medical information, and didn’t alert authorities when he told it he was having trouble breathing. He died in his room. 

Sam’s mother, Leila, gave heart-breaking testimony at a hearing I recently hosted in Congress on the dangers of surveillance AI. Her story is one of hundreds of parents who have lost their children as AI companies have prioritized their profit over parents’ pain as well as a growing list of harms to society.   

A few giant Big Tech companies are building massive data centers that pollute our water and air and drive up our costs by surveilling consumers and scraping knowledge from humans to feed these AI algorithms. They have designed chatbots for engagement over safety, driving people like Sam to hurt themselves. They’ve created AI agents that prioritize deception, go rogue and hack systems. All the while, these same corporations are telling workers they need to train their AI models to replace their own jobs and skills.  

The range of harms to data privacy, children’s safety, worker rights and market concentration necessitates an urgent, comprehensive response from Congress that gets to the root of the problem and ensure that AI companies serve the public interest instead of their shareholders and are held to serious guardrails and safeguards before harm is ever committed.  

That is why I have released a new legislative framework for a National AI Charter Act that would require every AI company to have a federal charter to be in the AI business in this country. The act is modeled after existing regulatory frameworks and combines round-the-clock federal oversight, strict safety mandates, and structural separation built into national bank charters with the rigorous pre-release federal testing required for nuclear materials and dangerous weapons.  

At its core, the National AI Charter Act recognizes that AI risks are connected and driven by underlying market structures, surveillance business models, and profit motives. It sets clear terms that AI companies have to follow to stay in business, while giving the government a powerful new tool to hold AI companies accountable before they create harm.   

The charter’s terms and conditions are mandatory and ban AI companies from building monopolistic empires, releasing risky models, stealing through surveillance, exploiting workers, or causing serious harm. AI companies that don’t agree, don’t comply, or put the public in danger would get shut down, and their executives could face criminal consequences for reckless or repeated offenses. 

This system would outright ban these companies from deploying AI models with rogue capabilities and catastrophic risks, including any scenario where AI could escape human control, help build weapons of mass destruction, or facilitate crime. It would protect kids from chatbots that build emotional dependence with kids, push eating disorder content, or enable suicidal ideations. It would protect people from deepfakes, and it would protect artists from theft. It would ban AI surveillance pricing and ensure that AI cannot deny or delay healthcare access, housing, or public benefits. It would put a holistic end to the predatory and dangerous outcomes that we have been seeing more and more.  

AI risks are connected and driven by underlying market structures, surveillance business models, and profit motives. This framework recognizes that. It would separate AI companies from Big Tech monopolies and ban their predatory commercial surveillance so that AI isn’t baked into the core Internet platforms everyone uses or trained with data harvested by tracking everything people do online.  Gating market access to companies that comply with these requirements would break Big Tech’s grip on AI, allow alternative responsible AI models to emerge, and protect the public from dangerous AI models. 

There are currently a handful of tech billionaires who are playing God and getting richer every day by stealing our private data. My charter would put control back into the hands of the people. It would give us back freedom and the right to privacy. And it would return the wealth that we are owed through a Monopoly Data Tax, from the money they made by stalking our every move, our locations, our searches, our connections with family and friends, our shopping habits, our interests – every piece of our private lives that they could track 

We need meaningful oversight at every single stage. AI has grown too big and too powerful for anything other than a seismic shift, a change of the entire industry. That is what Sam deserved, and it’s what will save others’ lives.  

U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D) represents Washington’s 7th district and is co-chair of the Monopoly Busters Caucus.