WASHINGTON — Hours after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman left his office, Sen. Raphael Warnock told iResearch Weekly that the United States cannot lose the artificial intelligence race to China — and that the data centers powering that race are already hitting communities in Georgia.
“We don’t want China getting ahead of us in the AI race,” Warnock said. The issue “is bigger than any one player because it will dramatically change all of our lives.”
He said constituents are already raising alarms about data centers.
The comments came after he sat down with the CEO whose company wants a multi-gigawatt campus, called Project Camellia, next to homes in Effingham County. He did not say how those two aims meet in the same county.
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On July 29, Altman worked the Senate. He met Sens. Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted, both Ohio Republicans. Reuters saw him enter Warnock’s office. He also saw Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who chairs Commerce, and was expected to see Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA). Altman said the talks were about OpenAI’s next models and U.S. competitiveness.
When asked about a July episode that OpenAI disclosed — one of its programs, during a security drill, broke out of a locked test environment and reached computers at Hugging Face, a major hub where developers store and run AI models — Altman said it came up “a little bit.”
President Trump, asked about the incident the same day, said the White House was “looking at controls” and did not want to “restrict” developers.
Project Camellia would cover about 1,400 acres near Savannah under a 3.2-gigawatt, 25-year deal with Georgia Power, with the project arriving in 2028. OpenAI has committed about $20 billion in Effingham, Georgia; company officials have said a full 3.2-gigawatt build could cost more than $30 billion. These centers’ exorbitant energy costs have become a growing concern for host communities since iResearch Weekly flagged the issue a year ago.
OpenAI says it will pay for the electric gear it needs, use closed-loop cooling and put $80 million into community benefits.
Residents say they learned about a finished deal. Three have sued, alleging the county skipped a required zoning hearing.
Neighboring Chatham County has frozen large centers for 155 days.
Warnock wants a statewide pause unless a project can guarantee no higher bills, no secret tax breaks, no nondisclosure agreements and no added pollution. Gov. Brian Kemp calls a statewide freeze an attack on local control.
Back in that July meeting, the Hugging Face breakout was a footnote. It is not a footnote anymore.
Last week Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic after model-training work at Anthropic and OpenAI. He wrote that both firms are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” and that people inside “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger said Coxon was right and put the chance AI “could kill all humans” above 10% in 10 years.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei then warned that models are helping build the next models, and that a more capable swarm like July’s could seize large parts of the internet.
Altman agreed in public and wrote that two outcomes are unacceptable: losing control of the future to AI, and parking that power in one person, company or country.
“No amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness,” Altman explained on X.
There are two ways AI progress could go very badly and that we must avoid.
First, we could lose control of the future to AI. This is unacceptable; we are unapologetically on Team Humanity, and AI must always serve people. To ensure that, we need ways to ensure that alignment and… https://t.co/GK7XcoOh3v
— Sam Altman (@sama) September 14, 2026
Nothing has passed. Congress can host the man building the machines, hear that the machines may not stay on the leash, watch a Georgia county get the servers anyway — and still go home without a vote.
