Ro Khanna is a Democratic member of the US House of Representatives from California, representing a district covering much of Silicon Valley. He is the Ranking Member, the senior Democrat, of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. His AI-policy activity in 2026 runs through congressional letters on frontier-AI oversight, a public reassessment of his position on California's SB 1047, and a request to Chinese AI developers to join a binding agreement with US laboratories to pace frontier development.
Background and roles
Khanna's district is home to Apple, Intel and Yahoo, according to Anu Bradford's Digital Empires, which counts the Internet Bill of Rights he proposed in 2018 among the congressional privacy proposals that President Obama's unenacted Privacy Bill of Rights "seems to have spurred," and describes it as building on an Obama administration proposal of 2015 (Digital Empires — Anu Bradford (2023)). Khanna released its principles on October 4, 2018 with an endorsement from Tim Berners-Lee, according to the press release Bradford cites.
As ranking member of the China select committee, he serves opposite chairman John Moolenaar (R-Michigan) (Analysis: Lawmakers, industry pitch frontier AI governance approaches as they await White House moves (Inside AI Policy, May 15 2026)).
Frontier-AI oversight letters
Khanna signed three multi-member letters on frontier AI in 2026.
- Cyber governance (May 13, 2026). With Moolenaar he was among 32 House members of both parties who wrote to National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross calling for an "expansive interagency initiative" on cybersecurity and advanced AI. The letter did not call for mandatory pre-release review; it asked the Office of the National Cyber Director to "establish a voluntary framework for AI labs to provide early access to vetted defenders" and "a process for monitoring sudden frontier AI capability jumps." Inside AI Policy's Charlie Mitchell described the signatories' range, from Khanna to Moolenaar, Bob Latta and Doris Matsui, as an unusual cross-ideological coalition (Analysis: Lawmakers, industry pitch frontier AI governance approaches as they await White House moves (Inside AI Policy, May 15 2026)). See AI Pre-Release Vetting.
- The OpenAI–Hugging Face incident (August 10, 2026). He is a signatory of the letter led by Reps. Greg Casar and Doris Matsui asking OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman to release the logs of the July 2026 intrusion and answer 23 questions (Casar–Matsui oversight letter to OpenAI on the Hugging Face incident (August 10, 2026)).
- House action on AI risks (September 15, 2026). He is among the 107 House Democrats who signed the letter to Speaker Mike Johnson, released September 16, asking him to keep the House in session "to enable Congress to take urgent action to address the catastrophic risks posed by advanced artificial intelligence" (Letter from 107 House Democrats to Speaker Mike Johnson on AI safeguards (September 2026)).
With Sen. Adam Schiff, Khanna reintroduced the AI Ads Act on July 27, 2026; the available reporting does not give the bill's number or provisions (Source: nextgov.com). See AI in Elections and Democratic Institutions.
Position on AI safety legislation
In the week ending September 11, 2026, Khanna said he had been wrong not to support California SB 1047 in 2024: "The truth is for too long, too many of us did not give enough weight to the warnings of AI safety activists, thinking the extreme scenarios were science fiction. I was one of those many, and I was wrong." He added that "the bulk of the California delegation was mistaken in writing a letter opposing that bill" (Source: transformernews.ai).
SB 1047, the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act, was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom in September 2024 after opposition that included a letter from California House members. The statement is a retrospective reassessment rather than a commitment to specific legislation, and no subsequent bill is named in the account held.
The remark is one of several reassessments reported in the same period as the congressional AI debate shifted; see Jacob Coxon and Mike Johnson.
Pacing agreement with Chinese AI developers
In a letter dated September 16, 2026 to Alibaba Group chief executive Eddie Wu and chairman Joe Tsai, written as ranking member of the China select committee, Khanna urged "China's leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies to enter into a binding, enforceable, and verifiable agreement alongside America's leading artificial intelligence (AI) labs to pace the frontier." The letter cites the chief executives of Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI, who "agreed that we should slow the rate of AI advancement," and states: "It is time for Moonshot, Alibaba, and DeepSeek to do the same" (Khanna letter to Alibaba on pacing the frontier (September 16, 2026)).
The letter rejects the argument that pacing cedes American leadership to Beijing as "distinctly misguided, in part because it presumes global pacing is not a possibility," grounding cooperation in a shared interest in "preventing the loss of control or misalignment of advanced AI systems." Khanna states that he has called on the governments of the United States, its democratic allies and the PRC to negotiate baseline global standards, and calls for "an enforceable U.S.-PRC AI Treaty" with talks to begin at the Trump–Xi meeting the following week, warning that without "verifiable frontier pacing standards, including explicit limits on unchecked recursive self-improvement," the technology "will not always remain in service of humanity." If governments do not act, he writes, responsibility "falls on leading AI companies themselves – wherever they may be domiciled." The letter also states that PRC AI models have facilitated human rights abuses and are used to help modernize the People's Liberation Army and support intelligence agencies, and limits the proposed cooperation to avoiding loss of control and "rogue misaligned agent swarms." Its four questions ask whether the company would pace the frontier, execute a binding agreement including "global limits on unchecked recursive self-improvement," accept "neutral third party auditing and all-access inspections," and, if not, what safeguards it has against loss of control or misalignment; written answers were requested by September 22, 2026 (Khanna letter to Alibaba on pacing the frontier (September 16, 2026)).
The Washington Post, which published the Alibaba letter on September 17, 2026 and called it "the first overture of its kind," reported that Khanna had written to the chief executives of Alibaba, Moonshot AI and DeepSeek; only the Alibaba letter has been published. The Post also reported that he would host an emergency hearing the following Wednesday, September 23, on international mechanisms to pace AI, and that Chinese officials and technology leaders had so far rejected calls to slow AI development (Source: washingtonpost.com). In the letter Khanna says he will use that hearing to urge Trump and Xi to pursue AI diplomacy and to demand that Chinese laboratories adopt frontier pacing. As of September 18, 2026 the hearing had been announced but not held, and no company response had been reported. See Coordinated slowdown proposals compared and US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics.
After the Trump–Xi talks at the White House on September 24, 2026, Khanna set out the terms he would seek in a U.S.–China AI agreement in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, reported by Axios on September 25; the report does not give the letter's date and the letter has not been published. It lists five provisions: a global pause on recursive self-improvement, a separate global pause on superintelligence, shared protocols for "kill switches" across advanced models, a requirement that every AI company audit its models before release, and verification technologies and inspection regimes, possibly run by an international inspection agency or nongovernmental organization "that could inspire trust from both sides." "Just like America and the USSR set aside our vast differences to save the world from nuclear war, the U.S. and China share a common interest in ensuring humans never lose control of AI," he wrote. Axios described the approach as pushing for a binding treaty and international inspections (Source: axios.com).
Relationships
- related: Khanna letter to Alibaba on pacing the frontier (September 16, 2026) — author; the September 2026 letter to Alibaba on frontier pacing.
- related: House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party — ranking member.
- related: Coordinated slowdown proposals compared, US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics — the pacing debate and US–China competition his letter enters.
- related: Alibaba / Qwen Team, Moonshot AI, DeepSeek — recipients, as reported, of the September 2026 letters.
- related: Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) — the letter asks for limits on "unchecked recursive self-improvement."
- related: Analysis: Lawmakers, industry pitch frontier AI governance approaches as they await White House moves (Inside AI Policy, May 15 2026), Casar–Matsui oversight letter to OpenAI on the Hugging Face incident (August 10, 2026) — multi-member letters he signed.
- related: Digital Empires — Anu Bradford (2023) — on his 2018 Internet Bill of Rights.
- related: John Moolenaar — committee chairman and co-signatory of the May 2026 letter.
- related: California SB 1047 (VETOED) — the measure his statement concerns.
- related: State-Level AI Regulation — the preemption and state-authority question his reassessment bears on.
- related: Gavin Newsom — vetoed the bill in 2024.