Sen. John Kennedy says AI could independently hack nuclear codes and launch missiles within five years

Senator John Kennedy told Theo Von that people with brains bigger than his have informed him that within five years, AI will not only know everything but will think independently and begin acting on its own. His example of what that looks like in practice: AI breaks the nuclear code and launches ballistic missiles at China with no human in the loop and no way to stop them. This was episode 666 of This Past Weekend. They also discussed fig newtons.

Kennedy is not some backbench alarmist. He sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee, oversees the Department of Energy budget, and gets briefed in a secure underground room called the SKIFF by the Joint Chiefs, the CIA director, and the Secretary of State. So when he says there are currently zero AI regulations in place and calls that scary, it is worth sitting with that for a second. Not because it is necessarily true in every particular, but because the guy who helps write the federal government’s nuclear budget is saying it on a podcast to a comedian from Covington, Louisiana.

I have talked to people that have brains a lot bigger than mine that say within five years, not only will AI and these chat boxes know everything, but they will become independent and can think on their own.

The claim is real, it is searchable, and it is also doing some work Kennedy probably did not intend. The five-year timeline is not his own expertise, it is something unnamed smart people told him, which is the political equivalent of citing “some people are saying.” The AI-launches-nukes scenario he describes is a genuine concern among researchers, but the framing, that an AI would simply decide to start a nuclear war the way it might decide to book you a plane ticket, mixes legitimate infrastructure vulnerability warnings with something closer to a movie pitch. Kennedy himself admitted he is “no expert.” That honesty is rare in a senator, and it does not make the underlying concern wrong.

No Regulations, No Parking

What landed harder than the five-year prediction was the admission that followed. Kennedy said flatly that Congress has no AI regulations in place right now, none, and that they are only beginning to try to build some. Von, to his credit, pushed back with genuine alarm rather than just nodding. The exchange had the texture of two guys from Louisiana staring at a thing neither fully understands but both correctly sense is enormous. Kennedy noted that powerful tech lobbyists are the reason these conversations keep stalling, a point he made with the same blunt clarity he brought to everything else.

It can make our lives better if it doesn’t kill us all first.

The rest of the episode covered a lot of ground that will not surprise anyone who follows Kennedy. He called Chuck Schumer a five-year-old in a Batman costume. He told Trump that tweeting less would not cause brain cancer and that he likes a steak but not eight of them at once. He went long on Iran, defending the Trump administration’s strikes by citing classified intelligence he has personally reviewed in the SKIFF, and he pushed back clearly on the genocide framing of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, attributing civilian deaths to Hamas using Palestinians as shields. Von brought the UN report on children killed, Kennedy said he would not trust the UN, and neither man fully convinced the other. It was a more substantive argument about the Middle East than most cable news panels manage.

Louisiana, Which Is Ten and a Half Times More Interesting Than Texas

The most purely enjoyable parts of the episode had nothing to do with policy. Kennedy grew up in Zachary, Louisiana, population then about 3,000, and he and Von spent real time in the kind of shared-memory conversation that only happens when two people are actually from somewhere. Kennedy recalled watching raccoons pour out of missing baseboards in the bus boy section of a restaurant while someone beat them back with a broomstick. He told Von that Louisiana is ten and a half times more interesting than Texas. He explained that the Zachary High School Broncos meant two things to him growing up: his studies, because of his parents, and basketball and cheerleaders, at which he was, in his words, not worth a damn at either one.

I’ve lived in five states in a foreign country and I’ve never met people like the people in Louisiana. They’re god-fearing, they’re hardworking, they’re funloving. They’re authentic.

Kennedy is genuinely funny in the way that some Southern politicians are, which is to say the jokes are embedded in the worldview rather than performed on top of it. When Von mentioned Biden’s debate collapse, Kennedy said he was in Wyoming watching on TV and for once was speechless. He paused. “And so was he.” That one landed. The episode is messy and long and occasionally goes forty minutes without circling back to anything, which is the format. But the AI nuclear launch claim is the thing that will follow this episode around, and Kennedy probably knows it. He said it calmly, cited his unnamed sources, and moved on to fig newtons. That is either the most Louisiana thing imaginable or a preview of how the Senate actually processes existential risk. Possibly both.