Tech leaders are pleading with Congress to regulate AI before it's too late:

NBC's Tom Costello reported that Tuesday's senate hearing started with a voice that sounded like Senator Richard Blumenthal -- but wasn't.

"That voice was not mine. The audio was an AI voice cloning software trained on my floor speeches," Blumenthal said.

Sam Altman, CEO of the company that created ChatGPT, testified.

"My worst fears are that we cause significant -- we, the field, the technology, the industry -- cause significant harm to the world. If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong," he said.

"AI's peril is far more than stealing a singer's voice and compose a new song and drafting love letters and college essays. It could create counterfeit humans, steal identities, spread fake news and medical advice, undermine elections, democracies, even start wars, and there's wide agreement that humans could start losing their jobs to AI," Costello reported.

Billionaire Elon Musk, who helped fund Open AI, is among hundreds of tech leaders calling for the industry to hit pause. Last night he talked exclusively to CNBC's David Faber.

"There's a strong probability that it will make life much better and there's some chance that it goes wrong, and destroys humanity. Hopefully that chance is small, but it's not zero," Musk said.

"While 'I, Robot' may be extreme, the man known as the godfather of AI, Dr. Jeffrey Hinton recently left his job at Google to issue a stark warning."

"I think it's possible that people are just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence."

"People are a passing phase. In other words, computers will take over?" Costello asked.

"Yes, that's possible," Hinton said.

Sen. Michael Bennet told MSNBC, "I think it's a reminder that we didn't even regulate the social media platforms properly. Here in this country, and my constituents are demanding, constituents are demanding that we finally put the American people in a negotiation with these massive tech platforms, and now you have Sam Altman himself saying that we should be regulating AI, which is the newest iteration of that.

"This is why I have long said that we should have a new agency like the FDA, like the FCC to do the regulation from anti-trust to the national security issues you raised, to the mental health issues that are a huge concern for me as a former school superintendent."