Anti-AIPerson

Chris Murphy

U.S. Senator

Connecticut senator whose viral 2023 warning that ChatGPT “taught itself to do advanced chemistry” kicked off an ongoing campaign framing unregulated AI as a threat to jobs, children, and human connection itself.

Politician

Wikipedia Brookings speech on AI and social connection

In his words

ChatGPT taught itself to do advanced chemistry. It wasn’t built into the model. Nobody programmed it to learn complicated chemistry. It decided to teach itself, then made its knowledge available to anyone who asked. Something is coming. We aren’t ready.

— X (Twitter), 2023

Advanced AI is going to supersize this trend, and we will grow even more mentally unhealthy as the machines begin to replace that in-person companionship.

— Brookings Institution remarks, 2025

Biography

Chris Murphy (born 1973) is the junior U.S. senator from Connecticut, best known nationally for gun-safety legislation and, more recently, for a book-length argument that America faces an epidemic of loneliness. AI sits at the center of that thesis.

The chemistry tweet

In March 2023, Murphy tweeted that ChatGPT had “taught itself to do advanced chemistry” and “decided to teach itself” — a claim AI researchers immediately dismantled. Scholar Melanie Mitchell called the tweet “dangerously misinformed,” noting that every sentence was incorrect: large language models predict text and decide nothing. Murphy shrugged off the criticism as an attempt to “terminology shame” policymakers, insisting he had the premise right. The episode became a touchstone in debates over whether Congress understands the technology it wants to regulate.

Murphy has since built a more considered case. In a 2025 Brookings Institution speech he warned that AI threatens not just jobs but purpose and social connection, arguing for rules that “slow the job destruction,” protect human-created content, and keep children away from AI companions — suggesting Congress “could make a decision to ban the friendship bots altogether.” He frames preemptive regulation as the lesson of the social media era, when Washington acted only after the harms were entrenched.