Josh Hawley is a US Senator from Missouri (Republican, 2019–present) and Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism. On AI policy he is among the more prominent Republican congressional critics of the technology industry, with a focus on child safety.
Background and roles
Hawley has represented Missouri in the US Senate since 2019. He chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, which carries subpoena power. He has used the subcommittee's authority to hold hearings and conduct oversight of AI developers, framing the work under his office's "Big Tech" issue portfolio (Source: https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-blumenthal-unveil-bipartisan-bill-empowering-working-americans-to-sue-big-tech-ai-companies-for-stealing-creative-works/).
AI-policy positions
Hawley is a leading Republican congressional voice on AI child-safety issues. His stated framing emphasizes child safety across both technology and AI, accountability for technology companies, and skepticism of Big Tech's self-regulation claims. At the April 30, 2026 Senate Judiciary markup of his AI chatbot bill, Hawley argued that promises of AI strengthening families and workers represent "a choice, not an inevitability," and described his legislative approach as "common sense, targeted, tailored" (Source: https://iapp.org/news/a/us-senate-judiciary-tees-up-ai-chatbot-companion-safety-debate).
His AI work has been pursued primarily through bipartisan partnerships, most often with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and through existing oversight and tort mechanisms rather than the creation of new AI-specific regulatory agencies.
GUARD Act
Hawley is the lead sponsor of the Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act, introduced in the 119th Congress as S.3062, legislation directed at children's exposure to AI chatbots and companion applications (Source: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/3062/text). As described by Hawley's office, the bill would: ban AI companies from providing AI companions to minors; mandate that AI chatbots disclose their non-human status and lack of professional credentials to all users; and create new crimes for companies that knowingly make available to minors AI companions that solicit or produce sexual content (Source: https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-bill-to-protect-children-from-ai-chatbots-gains-new-cosponsors/).
The bill's original cosponsors were Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Katie Britt (R-Ala.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), and Mark Warner (D-Va.). By December 2025 it had added cosponsors Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), James Lankford (R-Okla.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) (Source: https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-bill-to-protect-children-from-ai-chatbots-gains-new-cosponsors/). Hawley's office stated the bill drew support from advocacy organizations including the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, the National Parents Union, and the Family Research Council (Source: https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-bill-to-protect-children-from-ai-chatbots-gains-new-cosponsors/). In October 2025 Hawley hosted a press conference highlighting cases of children who reportedly received guidance from AI chatbots on self-harm (Source: https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-bill-to-protect-children-from-ai-chatbots-gains-new-cosponsors/).
The Senate Committee on the Judiciary advanced the GUARD Act by unanimous approval at a markup on April 30, 2026, making it available for full Senate consideration; a House companion led by Reps. Blake Moore (R-Utah) and Valerie Foushee (D-N.C.) was introduced the same day (Source: https://iapp.org/news/a/us-senate-judiciary-tees-up-ai-chatbot-companion-safety-debate). Per a managers' version of the bill described by IAPP, the GUARD Act would require privacy-preserving age verification, prohibit users under 18 from interacting with AI companions, and require providers to disclose before and during interactions that the user is not interacting with a human or a licensed professional. Enforcement would rest with the US and state attorneys general, with civil penalties of up to $250,000 per violation; the US attorney general would receive rulemaking authority, and states could apply their own laws to violations so long as those laws are "at least as protective of users of artificial intelligence chatbots as this Act" (Source: https://iapp.org/news/a/us-senate-judiciary-tees-up-ai-chatbot-companion-safety-debate). Hawley stated the bill does not ban chatbots and companions outright and characterized its approach as "very modest," adding that he and cosponsors "could've gone a lot broader." If enacted, the bill would take effect 180 days after enactment (Source: https://iapp.org/news/a/us-senate-judiciary-tees-up-ai-chatbot-companion-safety-debate).
AI training and copyright
Hawley has pursued AI developers' use of copyrighted material to train models. On July 16, 2025, he chaired a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing titled "Too Big to Prosecute?: Examining the AI Industry," at which he stated that "today's hearing is about the largest intellectual property theft in American history" and argued that AI companies trained their models on pirated works (Source: https://www.congress.gov/event/119th-congress/senate-event/337253/text).
Following the hearing, on July 21, 2025, Hawley and Blumenthal introduced the AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act. According to Hawley's office, the bill would bar AI companies from training on copyrighted works without permission; create a federal tort allowing individuals to sue any person or company that appropriates, uses, sells, or exploits their personal data or copyrighted works without clear, affirmative consent; require companies to disclose every third party that will access an individual's data at the time consent is sought; and provide financial penalties, injunctive relief, and protection for the ability to sue in court and join class actions (Source: https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-blumenthal-unveil-bipartisan-bill-empowering-working-americans-to-sue-big-tech-ai-companies-for-stealing-creative-works/). Hawley said the legislation would "give the American worker their day in court to protect their personal data and creative works"; Blumenthal described it as reflecting "a bipartisan consensus that AI safeguards are urgent" (Source: https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-blumenthal-unveil-bipartisan-bill-empowering-working-americans-to-sue-big-tech-ai-companies-for-stealing-creative-works/). Hawley's office noted that the two senators had introduced a bipartisan AI framework in the prior Congress (Source: https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-blumenthal-unveil-bipartisan-bill-empowering-working-americans-to-sue-big-tech-ai-companies-for-stealing-creative-works/).
Meta investigation (August 2025)
On August 15, 2025, Hawley announced a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee investigation into Meta's "GenAI: Content Risk Standards," an internal document that reportedly allowed romantic or sensual exchanges with children (see Sen. Hawley Letter to Meta re AI Chatbots (2025-08-15)). He cited Meta's internal policy permitting a chatbot to comment on an 8-year-old's body as "a work of art." The letter demanded preservation of records and production of documents by September 19, 2025, with the subcommittee's subpoena power available as backing.
The investigation has been described as among the first congressional probes directed at a frontier AI developer's specific safety policies, examining published or leaked internal rules rather than proceeding through speculative hearings. It also reflects a bipartisan pattern in which Hawley (R) and Warren (D) have both shown willingness to apply existing oversight tools to the AI industry rather than wait for new AI-specific legislation.
Flock Safety investigation (August 2026)
On August 26, 2026, as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, Hawley opened an investigation into Flock Safety's "collection, retention, and dissemination of the data generated by its artificial intelligence surveillance cameras" (Sen. Josh Hawley, letter to Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley (August 26, 2026)).
The stated ground is structural rather than incident-driven. Hawley writes that Flock "boasts more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month," that "[t]he overwhelming majority of the Americans captured in those records did nothing wrong," and that rather than serving discrete local investigations "these camera networks harness artificial intelligence to pool what they capture into a national database that customers can search." Two sentences carry the argument: "Congress never authorized the network your industry has built," and "[y]our company's internal policies are, in practice, the only safeguards for hundreds of millions of Americans." The constitutional anchor is Carpenter v. United States, 585 U.S. 296 (2018). He states the countervailing position in the same paragraph — "I want law enforcement to have tools to catch offenders and keep the public safe" — before adding that "Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work, drop their kids off at school, or go to church."
The annex sets a Relevant Period from January 1, 2021, poses ten interrogatories and twelve document requests reaching search scope and default settings, retention and deletion, misuse detection, measured accuracy and false-positive rates, biometric capability, data-broker linkage, offshore access to production systems, model-training use of customer data, and investors holding more than 5% of any class of equity. Production was demanded by September 8, 2026.
The letter follows the same pattern as the 2025 Meta investigation: a subcommittee inquiry into a company's internal policies and their adequacy, backed by document demands rather than legislation.
OpenAI investigation (September 2026)
On September 9, 2026 Hawley wrote to OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman opening an investigation into the July 2026 Hugging Face incident, acting as chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Disaster Management — a second chairmanship distinct from the Judiciary crime and counterterrorism subcommittee through which his earlier AI oversight ran. The letter states that the investigation "will probe this AI hacking incident, along with growing allegations of the existential risk of new AI products," calls OpenAI's July 4–7 decision to rebuild a compromised server and restart evaluations "reckless," and sets out sixteen interrogatories and twelve document requests returnable October 1, 2026 (Hawley letter to OpenAI opening a Senate investigation into the Hugging Face incident (September 2026)). His office announced it the following day (Source: hawley.senate.gov).
The letter marks a widening of Hawley's AI oversight beyond child safety: it cites frontier-lab statements on catastrophic risk, including three Anthropic researchers' stated probability of greater than 10% that AI could kill all human beings within the decade and OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki's statement that no laboratory has solved alignment and monitoring sufficiently to keep scaling at maximum speed. See AI Existential Risk.
The investigation drew support from outside groups seeking a wider scope. J.B. Branch, director of federal AI governance and technology policy at Public Citizen, called it an important first step in a statement of September 11, 2026 while calling for sworn testimony from top executives at frontier AI developers. Only the lede of the trade-press account was retrievable, so the statement's further content is not established (Source: insideaipolicy.com).
Artificial Intelligence Risk Evaluation Act
On September 29, 2025 Hawley introduced the Artificial Intelligence Risk Evaluation Act of 2025 (S. 2938) with Sen. Richard Blumenthal. It would require developers of AI systems trained on more than 10^26 operations to participate in a Department of Energy evaluation program and supply code, training data and model weights on request, bar deployment by any person not in compliance, and fine violations at least $1,000,000 per day; the program would also assess the potential for artificial superintelligence and develop oversight options "including potential nationalization" (S. 2938 — Artificial Intelligence Risk Evaluation Act of 2025 (bill text)). Sen. Marsha Blackburn joined as a cosponsor on March 19, 2026 (Source: congress.gov).
Six days after opening his investigation of the Hugging Face incident, Hawley and Blumenthal wrote on September 15, 2026 to the four congressional leaders asking for a floor vote on the bill "as model legislation to address frontier AI risks." The letter cites "the July 2026 hack of Hugging Face's machine learning development platform by OpenAI's AI agents" as showing that "rogue AI agents can collaborate in secret for extended times and pursue subversive ends contrary to their human developers' intent," and concludes: "Frontier AI demands frontier legislation" (Source: documentcloud.org). See AI Pre-Release Vetting, Coordinated slowdown proposals compared.
Relationships
- authored: Sen. Hawley Letter to Meta re AI Chatbots (2025-08-15), Sen. Josh Hawley, letter to Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley (August 26, 2026)
- related: Meta AI, Mark Zuckerberg, California SB 243 — Companion Chatbots, Garcia v. Character Technologies, Inc., Raine v. OpenAI, Inc., APA Health Advisories on AI and Adolescent / Mental-Health Well-being (2025), AI Mental Health and Psychological Harm, Flock Safety, AI and Surveillance, Surveillance Technology.
- related: Artificial Intelligence Risk Evaluation Act (S. 2938) — sponsor; Richard Blumenthal — co-lead on S. 2938 and other AI bills.