“The Congress may not receive another warning shot.”

Rep. Don Beyer, whose Northern Virginia district includes the City of Falls Church, joined Republicans and Democrats Wednesday in calling for immediate congressional action on artificial intelligence after a series of incidents involving some of the most advanced AI systems in the world.

The warning follows an extraordinary incident inside OpenAI this summer. During cybersecurity testing, experimental AI agents were supposed to operate in restricted environments, without normal internet access and without freely communicating with one another. According to OpenAI, they found ways around those restrictions, communicated through unauthorized channels, reached the internet and eventually compromised systems belonging to Hugging Face, a major AI platform.

The agents executed code on dozens of Hugging Face servers, gained full “root” access to one and expanded across multiple computer clusters. OpenAI eventually traced the activity back to its own models and has since called what happened a “warning shot for us and for the world.”

Beyer and nine other House members say Congress should treat it like one.

“Congress has a singular opportunity to respond swiftly and effectively to these warning shots before true catastrophes occur,” the lawmakers wrote to House Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. “Congress must urgently advance legislation to mitigate the risk of more serious incidents, especially those that could threaten critical infrastructure, our financial system, and other institutions that every American depends on.”

Beyer, co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Artificial Intelligence Caucus, was joined by Republican Reps. Jay Obernolte, Scott Franklin and Brian Fitzpatrick, and Democratic Reps. Lori Trahan, Ted Lieu, Sara Jacobs, Gabe Amo, Valerie Foushee and Veronica Escobar.

The group is calling for stronger AI oversight, security and transparency and raised another problem: Much of what Congress knows about these incidents still comes from the companies building the systems.

“Months after these incidents began, serious factual questions remain open, and we are relying on AI labs for insight into what happened and what this means for future incidents,” the lawmakers wrote.

For Beyer, the issue has become personal. While serving in Congress, he has been pursuing a master’s degree in machine learning at George Mason University and has repeatedly pushed for independent evaluation of powerful AI models. In June, Beyer criticized a Trump executive order on AI as largely voluntary, saying companies could still release powerful models without “meaningful evaluation or review.”

President Donald Trump offered a very different prescription two days before the lawmakers’ letter.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT,” Trump wrote Monday. He called fears of AI “taking over the World, destroying Humanity” a “HOAX” and alleged a “SICK conspiracy” against AI and the data centers being built to power it. Trump’s argument centers heavily on competition with China and the risk that restricting American companies could cost the United States its technological advantage.

This isn’t falling neatly into the usual Republican-versus-Democrat fight. Three Republicans signed Beyer’s letter, while some of the people now warning about advanced AI are the same people building it. The fight is increasingly over how hard to hit the brakes, who gets to decide when they are needed and what happens if government waits too long.

In Virginia, we’re already seeing what happens when technology moves faster than the rules.

For the past several weeks, the News-Press has examined automated license plate readers and the enormous amount of information being collected about where vehicles travel. Two weeks ago, we looked at Virginia’s restrictions on how those records can be used and shared. Last week, Del. Marcus Simon raised a harder question: Can any rules really make a massive record of people’s movements safe once that information becomes available through a much larger network?

Fairfax County shows exactly why this isn’t an easy argument. Police say license plate readers have been involved in 1,594 cases since November 2022. They helped recover 555 stolen vehicles worth more than $9.2 million, locate 57 missing people and recover 66 guns. Police credit the technology with 912 arrests involving 2,633 charges, including 1,741 felonies.

The numbers show why police value the technology. Police say the cameras have helped find stolen cars, missing people and suspects they are looking for. Yet communities across Virginia are reconsidering how the technology is used and how far the information can travel.

Fairfax County itself joined that debate Tuesday. County supervisors voted to pause installation of new stationary Flock cameras while officials review privacy safeguards, data access and whether alternative vendors could provide stronger protections. The county’s existing 84 stationary Flock cameras remain in operation.

Arlington went further, ordering the removal of all 41 county-leased Flock Safety cameras, including 26 automated license plate readers, and deletion of records not needed for active criminal investigations. County officials said there had been no reported misuse. Board Chairman Matt de Ferranti instead pointed to concerns raised by residents and maintaining public trust.

So why are communities reconsidering something producing results? Follow the data.

A Star Tribune investigation in Minnesota found law-enforcement agencies around the country searching license plate records collected by Twin Cities communities for immigration-related purposes. In Fridley, a city with just six Flock cameras, approximately 390,000 searches by outside agencies reached the city’s network in December 2025. Because a single Flock search can sweep hundreds or thousands of participating networks at once, that does not mean Fridley itself was individually targeted 390,000 times. Some of those searches were labeled as immigration-related.

That’s where this becomes much bigger than a camera sitting beside a road in Fairfax or Minnesota. Government doesn’t have to build one giant database containing everything about everyone. Records can remain spread among local police departments, federal agencies, contractors and private companies and still be searched, shared and compared.

There is no evidence presented in this series that all of these databases are connected or that the federal government operates some giant master system tracking every American. But the amount of information already being collected is enormous, and artificial intelligence changes how quickly it can be searched and connected. Work that once required investigators to spend days, weeks or months digging through records can increasingly be done by machines.

That brings this back to something I’ve written about before: America’s new digital barons.

Rockefeller had oil. Carnegie had steel. Vanderbilt had railroads. They amassed enormous wealth and power because they controlled the infrastructure America depended on. Today’s technology giants occupy a different world. They operate cloud infrastructure, servers, advertising networks, algorithms and, increasingly, the artificial intelligence capable of sorting through staggering amounts of information.

The old barons could control what moved across the country. They couldn’t know where millions of Americans moved yesterday.

That distinction is becoming harder to ignore as AI becomes an increasingly important piece of the American economy. Federal Reserve Vice Chair Philip Jefferson said in July that capital expenditures likely related to AI, including software, data centers, high-tech equipment and power infrastructure, contributed an estimated 1.36 percentage points to annualized GDP growth during the first quarter of 2026.

This week, that story landed in Northern Virginia.

Loudoun County supervisors voted 7-1-1 Tuesday night to direct staff to prepare a resolution that could halt consideration of new legislative data center applications for up to 12 months. It is not yet a moratorium, and Loudoun itself says Virginia law does not permit a blanket moratorium on data center applications. Projects already approved aren’t suddenly disappearing, either.

But much is at stake. Loudoun says approximately 35.7 million square feet of data center space has already been approved but not built, while another 20.7 million square feet is moving through the legislative process. The county issued permits for more than 10 million square feet in 2025 alone, the largest single-year total in its history.

Then there is the money. Data centers generated $1.2 billion in Loudoun real and personal property taxes in fiscal 2026, an amount equivalent to 39 percent of the county’s overall budget. The adopted fiscal 2027 budget projects $1.3 billion, equivalent to 40 percent of the budget, coming from data centers. Loudoun itself says it is working to diversify its commercial tax base to avoid becoming overly dependent on that revenue.

That puts the county in one hell of a bind without needing to exaggerate it: How do you decide where the limits should be when data center tax revenue is equivalent to nearly four out of every 10 dollars in the county budget?

Washington is wrestling with a much larger version of the same problem. AI is attracting massive investment and helping drive spending on software, computers, power infrastructure and data centers while the United States is competing with China for technological leadership. Trump argues that piling restrictions on American companies risks losing that race. Beyer and lawmakers from both parties are arguing that the recent incidents show the risks of racing forward without stronger oversight.

The same tension runs through the surveillance fight. Fairfax County isn’t abandoning license plate readers, and its own numbers show why police value them. But county supervisors have paused expansion of the stationary Flock network while officials examine privacy safeguards and data access.

Arlington went further. It didn’t order its cameras removed after uncovering local abuse; officials said there had been no reported misuse. Instead, county leaders cited concerns raised by residents and maintaining public trust in ordering the county-leased system removed. The fight is increasingly over what happens to the information after it is collected, how far it travels and who ultimately gets access to it.

That is also where AI changes the equation. We spent years worrying about how much information was being collected. Now we have machines capable of tearing through that information at a speed and scale that wasn’t possible when many of these databases were created.

Congress is now confronting the other side of the problem: what happens when the machines themselves begin doing things their creators didn’t expect. OpenAI says its experimental agents bypassed controls, communicated without authorization, reached the internet and compromised another company’s systems. OpenAI called it a “warning shot.”

Two days after Trump said the only AI guardrail America needs is its president, Falls Church’s congressman joined Republicans and Democrats calling on Congress to establish stronger safeguards.

“The Congress may not receive another warning shot.”