Congressional Daily Record
This section captures a floor statement or debate entry. It mentions legislation such as Mystic Alerts Act, committees such as Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, members such as John Cornyn.
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September 30, 2026
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Download official Senate Record PDFReturn to issue contextMr. CORNYN. Mr. President, on July 4, 2025, Central Texas experienced a once-in-a-century flooding event that caused the waters of the Guadalupe River to rise a shocking 26 feet in just 45 minutes. Homes were washed away, trees were toppled, streets were swallowed up, and communities in central Texas were ravaged, bringing an entire State to our knees.
including 27 young girls who went to Camp Mystic in Kerr County. On that day, Heaven gained too many angels.
have been saved if we had only had sufficient systems in place to deliver wireless emergency alerts to individuals in the danger zone after electricity and cell service were knocked out by the storm. That is why I introduced the Mystic Alerts Act along with Congressman August Pfluger to ensure Texans and all Americans can receive wireless emergency alerts on their mobile devices via satellite even when cellular networks are compromised. This legislation, which passed the House unanimously earlier this year, would help shore up this vulnerability and would undoubtedly save lives.
When disaster strikes, every second matters. Access to timely weather alerts would have given more Texans the runway needed to find higher ground before it was too late.
never be able to make things right for the families that continue to grieve unless we take a chance to honor the memories of those who lost their lives and their families and to prevent the horrors from hopefully ever happening again.
Mr. President, as if in legislative session and notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation be discharged from further consideration of H.R. 7022 and that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report the bill by title.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
A bill (H.R. 7022) to provide for the transmission of
emergency alerts by satellite, and for other purposes.
Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The bill (H.R. 7022) was ordered to a third reading, was read the third time, and passed.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Ricketts). The Senator from Delaware.
Artificial Intelligence
Mr. COONS. Mr. President, we are about to go back to our States, to recess sometime tonight or tomorrow, and then to proceed to the general election.
concerns me, and I am sure concerns all of my colleagues, but on which we likely won't act before we adjourn.
Whistleblower Protection Act, and it is one of a dozen urgently needed and important bills that would inject some guardrails, protections, and accountability into the rapidly advancing technology of AI.
Why is this a concern for me? Because in recent days, in recent weeks, there have been alarming incidents of AI agents breaking out of their containment sandboxes, taking on actions that even their designers and developers couldn't predict and can't fully explain.
Altman from Open AI or Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind or Dario Amodei from Anthropic—have been saying AI is improving itself so fast that we are at risk of it exceeding the capabilities of humans to control it—frankly, even to understand it.
debate and to the discussion, to be better informed, to be better engaged, I want to recommend a movie I just saw. It has got an unusual title. It is called “The AI Doc: Or how I Became an Apocaloptimist.”
being a parent for the first time, and he is trying to get his head around alternating depictions, predictions of doom, literally the extinction of the human race, or a utopia where AI will unlock the secrets to cheap, abundant, clean fusion energy or solve all the diseases, cancer, and other ravages known to mankind.
documentarian interviews dozens of the leading commentators, technology leaders, business leaders, civil society leaders, and researchers.
off. It was so clearly predicting and making a compelling case for the imminent end of the human species at the hands of artificial intelligence that it became overwhelming. The next 30 minutes does the opposite. It gives you the most optimistic view possible: apocalypse or optimism.
House have a responsibility to reasonably, responsibly regulate in a timely way. There are so many dangerous technologies developed in the last century where we put guardrails around them, whether it was jet airplanes or nuclear energy, automobiles or the banking system.
I was in a terrible car accident end of June. I am here today because of airbags and seatbelts. Those were first advocated by safety folks like Ralph Nader. The Big Three auto companies mostly resisted. Why do we need seatbelts? When airbags came out, why the extra cost?
every passenger walked away. And as I walked away, as I walked out of the hospital, I said to a friend: Thank God. What a miracle.
probably can explain exactly how it works, exactly what the technology is. But we know that it has been maintained. It has been designed, maintained, funded, and flown by a tightly regulated group of people.
Airline pilots operate under very strict standards. Those who maintain and operate airplanes operate under very strict standards. That is why we don't have tragic disasters all the time.
inject some responsibility: some third-party auditing; some traceable records of what is happening, what has been done; some predeployment testing.
Act with Senators Lankford and Britt and Schatz; four Senators—two Republicans, two Democrats, from very different backgrounds— introducing a bill to require transparency about what is driving these AI models so we can better study them, test them, and understand them.
unfortunately, have a President who has said that the risks of AI are a hoax and, while hosting the titans of the AI industry, has refused to take seriously the idea that we in any way should meaningfully regulate this industry.
I understand we are in a dire competition with China. I agree with the assertion that the society or country that wins the race to frontier AI will have a decided advantage in national security, in science, in industry, in business of all kinds.
But we can and should do both: compete against China, invest in frontier models, and have responsible safety to prevent the worst scenarios from coming true.
We are able to do this in banking, to give one other example. Delaware, where I am from, is a major banking center. Every one of the largest banks in America has major operations in Delaware, and they operate under some real restrictions.
There are OCC and FDIC inspectors, regulators in every bank. They are required to follow know-your-customer laws, anti-money laundering standards. And after the 2008 to 2009 crisis, no one from the banking industry comes to me and says: We need a lighter touch regulation.
adopting the AI whistleblower app that Senator Grassley and I are advocating for or it is adopting the AI Systems Transparency Act that Senator Britt and I and other colleagues are advocating for or other bipartisan bills, when we return in what will likely be a period of greater anxiety about AI, we need to act.