民主党备战AI监管：多套法案框架曝光，争议焦点在联邦预占

Welcome to Transformer, your weekly briefing of what matters in AI. If you’ve been forwarded this email, click here to subscribe and receive future editions.

NEED TO KNOW

• OpenAI fired three employees, with one saying “I believe we were fired for prioritizing safety over the near-term interests of OpenAI as a corporation.”
• The White House unveiled its Super Intelligence Force, led by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton.
• House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Brett Guthrie said he supports a kill switch for AI models that “go rogue.”

But first…

THE BIG STORY

If Democrats retake both the House and Senate next month — as looks increasingly likely — they will be in the not-so-enviable position of having to figure out how to regulate AI. In preparation, many are planting a stake in the ground: in the past few weeks, a plethora of legislative ideas has been put forward, each making a claim to be the way forward for AI legislation.

One fear among the party is that Republicans will try to use the lame-duck session to ram through a bill of their choosing. That could be Sens. John Thune and Amy Klobuchar’s reported bill, though that appears to be a long way from a deal. It could also be Reps. Jay Obernolte and Lori Trahan’s FRONTIER Act, which was partly endorsed by House Energy and Commerce Chair Brett Guthrie this week. Many Democrats, however, view that bill as a nonstarter thanks to its preemption provisions — while party leadership takes particular umbrage with the fact Trahan went over their heads in proposing it.

Dems know that if they want to avoid momentum building behind these bills, they have to provide an alternative. So that’s what they’ve started doing. At The Curve conference last week, Reps. Don Beyer and Sara Jacobs teased a bill which would establish a standard-setting federal agency and an “emergency switch” to allow the government to shut down models. (Both said they disliked FRONTIER because of preemption.) And this week, Sen. Maria Cantwell — who will chair the Commerce Committee if Dems take the Senate — published a legislative framework calling for “constant oversight” of frontier models by both the government and independent experts. Notably, it too does not discuss preemption.

Others are taking different approaches. Trahan published a liability-focused bill this week, while Sen. Ruben Gallego put out a “jobs plan” that calls for a “New Deal-style public service jobs program” to address AI-driven unemployment. On the more extreme end, there’s Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar’s Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act — a radical position that is nevertheless gaining traction.

None of these bills are going to get passed this year, and even if Democrats control Congress, nothing will get passed at all unless they can convince some Republicans to peel off and vote with them — something much easier said than done. But for all its faults, Congress is finally seriously considering a wide range of legislative options to deal with AI.

— Shakeel Hashim

THIS WEEK ON TRANSFORMER

• Bengio: ‘If you prioritize safety, leave frontier AI companies’ — Yoshua Bengio with a message for AI workers
• AI is going to run out of power — Kirsten Horton on how AI could outpace America’s power grid

Subscribe now

THE DISCOURSE

Sam Altman doesn’t seem to love Anthropic’s work with religious scholars:

• “I am very uncomfortable about people trying to ascribe religious force or a surrender of human judgment to AI models, and think it is a real safety issue.”

Altman also made a surprisingly candid statement about AI risks:

• “We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of [AI] and people having the agency.”

OpenAI safety team member David Robinson quit, lambasting the company’s culture in a resignation essay:

• “My former colleagues are smart, work hard, and try to make good choices. But as the company sprints from one launch to the next, it is failing to achieve the level of care that I believe is needed.”
• “Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster.”

Dean Ball corrected the record about alignment research:

• “The “alignment *to whom*?” question IS important, but it creates the illusion that the primary questions in alignment are philosophical or political rather than scientific. The current high-order question in alignment is, “can you align a smarter-than-human intelligence *to any set of values*?” instead of “but whose values should it be aligned to?” I wish we had the luxury of having the rather more familiar political/philosophical debate of “to whom?,” but at this moment we do not.”

Adam Thierer said Sen. Cantwell’s resistance to preemption was a non-starter:

• “...there will be no compromise or effective national AI governance framework unless she is willing to get serious about preemption of state AI frontier model regulation.”

Anthropic researcher Justin Curl had a theory for China’s relative opposition to AI safety:

• “The CCP is less safety-pilled than the US because it has stronger control mechanisms.”

Google DeepMind’s Séb Krier offered 20 interesting takes on AI:

• “[I’m] disappointed that parts of the AI policy ecosystem has felt so comfortable with populism, and happy [to] sacrifice important norms/principles to advance their aims.”
• “Many critics of AI safety also fail to really engage honestly with the fact that there will, in fact, be all sorts of important risks as we decrease the barriers to entry to many activities that otherwise require some degree of expertise.”
• “Too much of the AI safety community is a giant homogenous blob of correlated views, who read the same stuff and have the same groups of friends. This means you have a lot of correlated errors.”

POLICY

Executive

• The White House unveiled its “Super Intelligence Force,” chaired by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, with 120 days to report on AI risks and opportunities.
• Under Secretary of War Emil Michael, Director of the Office of Personnel Management Scott Kupor, FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, former AI czar David Sacks, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and members of Trump’s cabinet are part of the task force.
• The Commerce Department was conspicuously excluded, however.
• Co-chair Kupor told Axios it would pursue a flexible regulatory approach, saying he wanted to avoid rules that could quickly become outdated.
• Major tech firms pledged $2.4b in computing resources to the Trump administration’s Genesis Mission AI science initiative.
• National Compute, Anjney Midha’s new company, is donating $100m of compute credits to the effort.
• The Trump administration suspended Microsoft from the PERM visa program, alleging abuse.
• A few hours later, President Trump gave Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
• Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang, Lisa Su and Michael Dell received awards from Trump, too.
• The Pentagon finally confirmed that it has ceased use of Anthropic’s AI models.
• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he will propose a US-China emergency AI notification system, saying Beijing would likely agree.

Congress

• Senate Majority Leader John Thune called for a “light touch framework” on AI.
• Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle showed eagerness to codify the White House’s “morally binding” AI accord.
• Republicans are hesitant to overstep the president, though, and Democrats expect more leverage in 2027.
• Politico profiled Rep. Valerie Foushee, who House Democratic leadership is reportedly trusting to help shape their AI policy.
• House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Brett Guthrie said he supports a kill switch for AI models that “go rogue.”