Congress needs your call before the next AI incident

A one-minute voicemail can do more than you think

Guest post by Haven Harms

Picking up my phone

I dialed the number and waited expectantly as the phone rang.

“Thank you for calling the district office of Congressman Kevin Kiley,” a recorded voice began. “Our staff is currently unavailable. Please leave your name, contact information, the city you reside in, and your reason for calling, and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.”

In stereotypical millennial fashion, I don’t make many phone calls these days. When I do, it’s for a good reason.

I heard the beep giving the cue that it was my turn to speak. “I’m calling about OpenAI’s disclosure this week that its AI models autonomously escaped containment and hacked another company, Hugging Face.” After naming AI policy safeguards I wanted Congressman Kiley to support, I finished, “We really need more federal oversight on AI development.”

In the past, I typically called my representatives to ask them to support or oppose a specific bill. After hearing about OpenAI’s models escaping a testing environment and hacking another company, however, I felt a sense of urgency to act. We don’t actually know how bad the situation is, as new information continues to emerge. For example, we’ve recently learned that other services beyond Hugging Face were targeted by OpenAI’s models, and that Anthropic’s AI models also hacked into other companies over the past few months. To me, this situation appears to be a major fork in the road, and whether our leaders act or not could mean the difference between a future where humans remain empowered, and one where humans lose control to AI. Future AI incidents could be much worse.

Our elected officials need to know what happened, and they need to take action. If you have concerns about the way AI development is headed, one of the best ways to communicate about those concerns is to call your representatives.

“But wait, I’m just one person,” you may object. “What could my phone call possibly change?”

Do politicians actually listen?

In 2017, Senate Republican leaders needed nearly unanimous party support to repeal key parts of the Affordable Care Act. Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski faced intense pressure from their fellow Republicans to support the measure. However, their offices also received calls, emails, letters, and personal stories from constituents urging them to protect the ACA. Ultimately, Collins and Murkowski ended up joining Senator John McCain and the Senate’s Democrats to defeat the measure 51 to 49.

When asked whether constituents’ stories affected the senators’ votes, Murkowski replied, “How could they not?”

When you call an elected official’s office, a staff member logs the issue, your position, and the action you want. Then, your message is tallied and routed to the staffer who covers that policy area. Elected officials will not personally hear every voicemail, but staff brief them on what constituents are saying. Calls signal which issues constituents care about and what they want their representatives to do. They prompt staff research and shape legislative priorities. As calls accumulate, this can change what an office pays attention to, what is included in a bill, and how representatives vote.

Politicians have listened on AI before

When SB 1047 was introduced in 2024, members of the AI safety community joined with allies such as SAG-AFTRA, the union representing actors and other media professionals, to mobilize in support. The California bill, introduced by Senator Scott Wiener, sought to reduce catastrophic risks from the most powerful AI systems through safety testing, security protocols, incident reporting, and other safeguards. It also faced fierce opposition, particularly from AI labs, investors, and parts of the open-source and startup communities.

As people reached out with concerns and proposed changes, Wiener’s office revised the bill. Some changes appeared within weeks of the feedback, including a provision considering how much money developers spent training a model when determining which AI systems the law would cover.

“It’s not about just winning the fight. I want to get this right,” Wiener said, crediting the people who worked to provide constructive feedback.

Supporters also called and wrote lawmakers as the bill moved through the legislature. SB 1047 ultimately passed both chambers but was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom. The process later helped give rise to SB 53, which enacted some of the AI transparency protections advocates had sought.

Calling for the first time

For Max Harms, an AI alignment researcher (and my husband), SB 1047 was the nudge that pushed him to call an elected official for the first time. Reflecting back, Max explained why he had avoided making calls like this before:

“I had this notion when I was younger that, even though people sort of wanted me to call my elected officials, I didn’t have a lot of power to actually influence things. That was the excuse that I often told myself when I was too lazy to actually contact people — sort of this sense of powerlessness and smallness.”

SB 1047 gave him a reason to act. The bill faced organized opposition, and its prospects were uncertain.

“And as a result, I was like, oh yeah, well, I’ll do my part as a California citizen. I’m sure there are a bunch of other people who care about this issue, but the fact that I live in California and the fact that this is a state-level issue means that I have a particular responsibility to step forward.”

Max expected the call itself to be more involved.

“I was sort of expecting to talk to a staffer, to have a real human being on the line who wanted to know things like where I live and what my phone number is, and would need to have me explain the situation to them. But I just got an answering machine.”

His message was brief.

“I said my name, where I lived, and what I cared about. I was like, ‘please vote yes on SB 1047.’ And that was it. It took, like, at most five minutes, but probably more like one.”

The hardest part was getting himself to make the phone call. It was something Max had never done before, and he worried that he might find himself in an awkward situation or say something dumb. The call itself was easy.

Immediately afterward, he felt “relieved and proud. And a little bit embarrassed, even — embarrassed that I had gone so many years with this impression that contacting my government representatives was an ordeal, like something I had to brace myself for, instead of something that would only take a couple minutes and not even require talking to a human being.”

The experience changed how he approaches political outreach.

“It’s not like I look forward to contacting people, but now when somebody’s like, hey, there’s an AI thing that has happened or some other thing that matters — I consider it a pretty easy thing to do to just put it on my to-do list, you know, during lunch or something. Just make a few calls.”

When asked whether the calls had been worth it, even though SB 1047 was vetoed, Max’s answer was immediate: absolutely. “Actions should always be judged on the information available to the action taker at the time that they were made. Anything else is outcome bias. If SB 1047 had not gotten vetoed, then my actions would have been just as right or wrong to have taken. And I think there’s a decent shot that it could have become law. It’s only through everybody speaking up that politicians can feel where the tide of public opinion is turning.” These days, his outreach efforts have turned to calling members of Congress, because AI is a global issue, and action can’t stop at the state level.

The void answers back

From the outside, calling a politician’s office can feel like shouting into the void, especially when all you reach is voicemail. However, as I was writing this article, my phone rang.

It was Congressman Kiley’s office.

The staffer summarized the message I had left: I was concerned about the OpenAI incident and believed stronger federal oversight of AI development was needed. Then he asked whether I had anything else to add. After I encouraged Congressman Kiley to support meaningful safeguards, the staffer said he would pass my comments along to the congressman.

It turns out I wasn’t shouting into the void at all.

Call your senators and your representative. Finding the right phone number takes about thirty seconds: house.gov has a lookup for your representative, and senate.gov lists contact information for both of your senators. While I’ve been writing from the U.S. perspective, the principle travels. In democracies everywhere, elected officials need to hear from their constituents about AI. Calling ahead of a vote matters, but you don’t have to wait. It’s likely that the OpenAI and Anthropic hacking incidents won’t be the last of their kind, and the safeguards we get may depend on whether officials hear from constituents before the next one.

Make the call, and find out how easy it is for yourself. Then tell your friends and family about the anticlimactic voicemail you left, and invite them to contact their representatives too.

Haven Harms is the founder and principal of Harms Research & Consulting, supporting organizations working on AI safety, governance, and advocacy.

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The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.