Anthropic representatives have quietly pitched Capitol Hill lawmakers on a draft bill to regulate frontier AI safety and security, Politico reported on Friday, in reporting carried by Reuters and sourced to three people with knowledge of the efforts. The draft would require developers to test frontier models, be transparent about the findings, and submit to independent evaluation.
The halt power in the draft is deliberately narrow. The government could block a model’s release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than 1 billion dollars in damages, or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people, and the risk must stem from the creation or release of a biological weapon, the model evading its developer’s controls, or a cyberattack. The Commerce Department could ask a judge to halt a model after determining risk, and the draft expressly bars any other department, agency or officer from suspending development, deployment or internal use.
Independent evaluators would register with the Commerce Department and periodically evaluate labs and their frontier models. Labs could pay the evaluators provided the payment is not tied to the outcome, and evaluators who find an imminent enumerated risk must report it to Commerce within 72 hours of completing their assessment.
An Anthropic spokesperson told Reuters the bill represents proposals in the company’s Advanced AI Framework, released earlier this year, and would give the government the ability to block or deter dangerous deployments of the most powerful models while requiring testing, transparency and independent evaluation. The Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The pitch lands a day after NIST, the NSA and CISA published voluntary incident readiness practices for superintelligence training, covered in yesterday’s edition, and it would convert much of that voluntary posture into statute if Congress takes it up.