Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s head of public policy, said at POLITICO’s Decoded Summit in Washington, D.C., on September 16, 2026, that AI companies cannot be left to police themselves on an honor code, pressing for government rules addressing existential AI risk while arguing that the United States must keep its AI lead over China. Heck rejected the self-regulation approach that Republican leaders in Congress have so far relied on to address catastrophic AI risk, according to POLITICO’s account of…