Lori Trahan

When she talks to the voters back home about the rise of artificial intelligence, U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan hears concerns that are mutating almost as quickly as the technology itself.

Yes, they’re worried about the rise of energy- and resource-gobbling data centers. But they’re also increasingly worried about AI agents going rogue and evading the control of their very human creators.

“There is a safety conversation that is now happening because of these models that are escaping their labs, that are literally working with each other, hiding their moves, creating message boards, sacrificing themselves so that the collective succeeds,” the Westford lawmaker said during a wide-ranging discussion at the State House on Tuesday.

“I think that’s penetrated the minds of the folks back home and they want to know who the cops are on the beat,” she said.

Trahan joined state Sen. Barry Finegold, D-2nd Essex/Middlesex, to discuss the dual pushes to make the Bay State an AI industry leader and to make sure lawmakers don’t repeat the mistakes they made when they failed to properly regulate social media.

Trahan has become one of the loudest voices on Capitol Hill on regulating artificial intelligence.

She’s sponsoring a bill, known as the FRONTIER Act, that erects guardrails around the development and deployment of the most advanced artificial intelligence models.

But the legislation, co-sponsored by U.S. Rep. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., is currently in park with Congress on a lengthy recess. That’s left Massachusetts lawmakers to aggressively push for their own statewide regulations to fill the void.

Finegold, of Andover, is one of the lawmakers behind that effort. He’s championing legislation that would make the Bay State one of the most stringent regulators of transparency for “frontier AI labs,” including powerhouses such as OpenAI, Google and Meta, according to The Boston Globe.

Meanwhile, Gov. Maura Healey is pushing for stringent AI safety and transparency protections in the state’s pending Mass Wins economic development bill, MassLive previously reported.

“The way I look at it is that we’ve got companies right here in Massachusetts that have been part of building out AI. … It’s also the case that the companies that are building out these AI technologies have a responsibility to build them safely, and government has a responsibility to set reasonable guardrails,” the Democratic governor, who’s seeking reelection in November, told MassLive’s Scott Kirsner.

“This is something that Donald Trump and Congress should be taking up, because AI is a global challenge. I think it’s totally irresponsible and totally in keeping with who Donald Trump is that he’s letting AI companies and tech do whatever it wants,” Healey said.

Finegold said Tuesday that he sees no conflict between efforts to regulate AI and the ongoing efforts to make the state a nationwide leader in the industry.

“I think we can walk and chew gum. I think we can have a robust AI economy here,” Finegold said. “But what we’re also saying is that we want to put on guardrails. We want to make sure that it’s safe. And I think we’re pushing for both.”

The urgency among lawmakers mirrors growing anxieties within the tech sector itself.

High-profile AI safety researchers have fled companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. They’ve pointed to the need to prioritize catastrophic risk prevention over rapid commercial development, according to industry reports.

While both Trahan and Finegold agree that federal regulation is the ideal solution to prevent a patchwork of state laws, neither is willing to wait.

But Trahan also argued that trusting technology companies to self-regulate or waiting for the federal government to slowly self-correct would be the wrong move.

“I’m a mom of teenage kids. I know that we can’t do what we did in terms of taking a walk on regulating social media,” Trahan said. “These consequences are much more dire, as they’ve been sort of exposed these last few weeks.”

But even if Trahan and her fellow Democrats manage to pass a bill — whether this year under a Republican-controlled Congress or next year under a potentially Democratic one — they’ll still face a hostile White House

President Donald Trump, who still has two years left in his second and presumably final term, has argued that the only safeguard the nation needs is him in the White House. He’s dismissed efforts to rein in the industry as a “SICK conspiracy,” according to The Associated Press.

The Republican president has forcefully pushed back against calls by tech leaders such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and even former ally Elon Musk to have greater government oversight of AI.

Their goal is to ensure the technology is developed in ways that promote safety, address legal liability, feed economic growth, advance science and preserve national security, the AP reported.

Nonetheless, Trahan remains optimistic, pointing to her own bipartisan efforts to regulate the industry.

“The conversation has just completely changed in Washington. It is on us to keep that momentum up during these seven weeks while we’re home, but then also post-election, using November and December to pass these safety guardrails. So I do know that when we have the majority next year, we’ll be really focused on AI in all the different areas,” she said.

But she’s also a realist.

“We still have a republic. We have a president in the White House that needs to sign this legislation. We need 60 votes in the Senate. So I choose to operate in the political reality that I live in,” she said.

“And so that’s why we worked to get the (bill) to a place where it has a broad coalition of support,” she said. “Certainly, if that calculus changes and while there’s certainly parts that I’d want to make a little bit stronger, we would love to have the room to do that. But I think we’ll adjust when we see sort of where the votes are.”