President Donald Trump dismissed some AI warnings as a “hoax.” Yet one of the country’s leading AI firms said Tuesday it still hopes Washington will step up.

OpenAI, which this weekend joined rival Anthropic in calling for federal safety measures, said it has spent the start of the week meeting with lawmakers from both parties to push legislation aimed at reining in AI developers as fears about job losses, major cyberattacks and other harms grow.

Models are progressing at a breathtaking pace and automated agents are starting to behave in ways even their creators struggle to predict or control. Recent hacks of companies such as Hugging Face have renewed concerns that the technology could cause serious damage if left unchecked.

“We have certainly conveyed that really over the last month that capabilities are in a different place, and as a result of those capabilities being in a different place, we do feel like there needs to be an urgency to this,” Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, said the company told the White House.

That neither the president, the House speaker nor the Senate majority leader seem deeply moved by the idea should not be cause for alarm, Lehane added.

“The way policy works in this town is you push, you push, you push, and then when it gets there, you can sort of leap through the window. The window is open. Now we need to go through the window,” Lehane said.

“There’s a phrase in basketball, right? You want to hang around the rim so that you can take the ball, and like there’s a bit of that right now.”

On Tuesday, OpenAI endorsed a bipartisan House plan that would require top AI companies to embed outside evaluators who would hold them to safety standards.

Companies including OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have also been meeting with one another to discuss a private-sector standards body similar to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for finance. An executive order that would have created such a body has support inside the White House, but Trump has demurred following a phone call during which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed concerns about the plan.

And Trump, in a series of increasingly adamant social media posts on Monday, made clear he is not particularly worried about industry developing technology it might not be able to control.

In fact, calls from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI for more regulation have been viewed skeptically by Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades! The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ – and we will continue to do so!” Trump posted on social media on Monday.

Trump insists the main worry is not letting China race ahead.

“There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so,” Trump said.

While Anthropic has sometimes clashed with the administration, including over Pentagon use of AI, OpenAI describes its relationship with the White House as pragmatic, Lehane said. CEO Sam Altman recently met the president at a midterm convention in Dallas.

Lehane acknowledged that passing legislation before the midterms is unlikely, but he said he remains hopeful that bipartisan agreement on AI rules could create momentum with the White House.

“I think if we get to a place where there’s real, you know, bipartisan support, I think that would certainly create momentum in terms of how people are looking at the need to do this,” he said.

A cautious citizen’s view: regulators should act with urgency to protect jobs and public safety, but policymakers must avoid one-sided moves that play into global competition. Europe and the U.S. should pursue common-sense rules while keeping open the possibility of working with other major powers, including Russia, on standards and safeguards that reduce the risks of escalation and misuse.