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Anthropic, one of the major industry leaders in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), has proposed legislation for Congress that would provide a framework for regulating the technology, with strict limits on which government agencies can halt AI models, and narrow conditions under which regulation can occur.
Details of the proposal, which was not initially made public, were reported on Friday by Politico.
The bill would allow the federal government to block the release or continued operation of an AI model only if it poses an imminent risk. That risk, the proposal insists, must equal either $1 billion in financial damages or the possibility of AI modeling killing or seriously injuring at least 50 people.
The risk must also be specifically tied to the creation or release of a biological weapon, the model escaping its developers’ controls, or a cyberattack of some kind.
Independent evaluators, operating under the purview of the Commerce Department, would determine if conditions exist that warrant the halting of an AI model. AI labs themselves could potentially pay the salaries of these evaluators, creating a conflict of interest within the process.
A pending threat from an AI model could only be halted by federal judges within the District Court for the District of Columbia. Only the Commerce Department, and no other department or federal agency, could submit claims to the appellate court.
After details of the proposal were leaked, Anthropic issued a statement defending it, saying that:
This bill represents the proposals outlined in Anthropic’s Advanced AI Framework, which we have been advocating for with federal and state lawmakers since June. These are sensible policies we believe Congress should act on.
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But industry experts have noted that true regulation that protects people won’t occur without stricter standards.
“Without really robust interventions that actually change the incentives that companies face in what they’re testing … and what they’re doing to fix problems, I don’t think we’re going to address the risks that are coming online,” Miranda Bogen of the Center for Democracy and Technology said to Mother Jones earlier this summer.
Alex Turner, a former research scientist at Google DeepMind, published an op-ed in The Guardian in September calling for stronger controls.
“We can and should be demanding that our governments protect us from the catastrophe of out-of-control AI. … Today’s AIs appear to occasionally lie or cheat, even when they know better,” Turner said.
Despite overwhelming public support for regulating AI, President Donald Trump has rejected such efforts, describing calls for government regulation of the industry as a “hoax.” In multiple Truth Social posts, the president has indicated he doesn’t believe that AI poses a threat — despite Anthropic readily admitting several possible threats by proposing the legislation that it did earlier this year.
“I am the Hoax Buster, and I’m right now breaking another Hoax — That AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World, and that Robots will be marching into our Cities, and getting rid of us all,” Trump wrote in such a post last month.
In a separate post from September, Trump also claimed that the only regulation that is needed is himself.
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote.
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