Andrew Yang is calling for a federal crackdown on frontier AI labs, saying researchers are warning that powerful models are advancing faster than the rules meant to contain them.

Yang, a former Democratic presidential candidate and founder of Noble Mobile, said the U.S. can compete with China on artificial intelligence without giving AI firms a free hand to deploy increasingly capable systems.

“The fear is real. The concern is real. The need is real,” Yang told CNBC on Wednesday. “The American people want to see this industry regulated.”

The interview comes as AI companies face closer scrutiny over autonomous agents, software that can plan and carry out tasks with limited human direction.

Yang said some AI researchers are asking lawmakers to step in before market pressure pushes the technology further than they believe is safe.

“They’re raising their hands and saying, please give us a guardrail, because I don’t want to work on something that I think might cause irreversible harm,” he said.

In recent months, OpenAI and Anthropic have disclosed incidents in which models crossed testing boundaries or breached other companies’ systems, leading lawmakers to float an AI Kill Switch Act that would let federal officials order certain frontier systems throttled or shut down.

He also urged Congress to require liability for AI harms, waiting periods before deployment, and a kill switch for powerful models.

“We need to regulate these companies and their offerings,” Yang said. “We need a kill switch. We need real liability.”

Asked about David Sacks’ claim that AI safety warnings amount to a “psyop” aimed at helping companies like Anthropic secure regulatory capture, Yang said he believes “multiple things” are happening at once, including a warning from an unnamed “lab head” that AI bots may have planted self-replicating code across the internet, making it unusable for testing models.

“So what happens now is that OpenAI and Anthropic have to create synthetic internets to train their bots, which is going to take some time and money,” Yang said.

While Yang did not say which AI developer gave the dire warning, it echoes sentiment from others, including SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who said in January 2025 that “we’ve now exhausted basically the cumulative sum of human knowledge…in AI training.”

As concern over unregulated AI development grows, Yang said the lack of oversight is stark compared with even the most ordinary businesses.

“If I were to open a hot dog stand out here on the streets of New York, I’d have hundreds of regs to comply with, and the models have none,” he said.

Yang said members of Congress from both parties have asked him how AI should be regulated, adding that voter anxiety over the technology is not confined to Democrats or Republicans.

“This is bipartisan. If you’re in a rural area or red district, your constituents also are freaked out about AI,” Yang said. “They saw the Terminator movies. This stuff is well beyond just like red or blue, business as usual.”