At a moment when artificial intelligence has moved from speculative horizon to operational reality, the question of who governs it — and how — has arrived in the halls of Congress with new urgency. Representative Rick Larsen of Washington is pressing his colleagues to treat AI safety not as a future problem to be studied, but as a present responsibility to be legislated. The threats he names are both immediate — terrorist exploitation, unsupervised autonomous systems — and existential, touching on questions humanity has rarely had to answer under deadline. Whether democratic institutions can m