Appearing on “Fox & Friends Weekend,” Attorney General Todd Blanche rejected calls for new artificial intelligence (AI) regulations, asserting that current laws are sufficient to combat emerging tech threats.
Throughout the interview on Sunday, Blanche maintained that existing laws enforced by the Department of Justice (DOJ) are sufficient to regulate AI, while rejecting calls for new safety measures, simply stating, “we don’t need it.”
Blanche’s comments come amid mounting warnings from leading AI companies — including OpenAI and Anthropic — suggesting development may need to slow.
The warnings follow tens of thousands of reported security incidents where autonomous AI models bypassed guardrails, with Fox News reporting that rogue agents targeted three U.S. government websites and the United Nations public data portal.
However, the attorney general dismissed the concerns, maintaining that existing federal criminal statues already provide investigators and prosecutors with the necessary means to bring charges against those who use AI to commit crimes.
“Everybody’s saying more laws, more laws, more regulation, but we don’t need it. We don’t need it right now,” he said. “If somebody’s behind that, if there’s entities that are bad actors… we have the tools to prosecute them.”
“[The] DOJ absolutely has a role… and we have prosecuted bad actors in the AI space and any other space from emerging technologies for decades,” he continued. “If you’re a bad actor in the AI space, it’s not as if there’s no laws that are on the books.”
“The U.S. has to be the leader in this technology. We can’t fall second [or] third place,” he stressed.
Nonetheless, opponents argue that the core issue is that AI itself has the potential to independently commit crimes for which no governing laws yet exist — rather than simply failing to prosecute the “bad actors who use AI to cause harm,” as Blanche put it.
Top AI researches have highlighted that if an autonomous system causes harm, it can be difficult to determine who is legally responsible — the developer, the deployer or the user — as criminal statues were written assuming human action, not an autonomous agent.
