Over the past year, as concerns have steadily swirled over the potential dangers posed by rapidly advancing artificial intelligence, debates have raged across the tech sector and government regarding the proper path for AI safety. Policymakers, industry leaders, and researchers have struggled to find a regulatory balance that protects the public without stifling innovation. Now, artificial intelligence research and development lab Anthropic appears to have put forth its own concrete vision for how the federal government might regulate its rapidly growing industry.
According to recent reporting, the prominent AI lab has been circulating a draft bill focused on AI safety that it hopes members of Congress might consider adopting into federal law. The proposed legislation outlines specific, highly consequential scenarios in which the release, deployment, or wider distribution of an advanced AI model could be legally blocked or halted.
The scenarios that would trigger such a regulatory intervention involve a "foreseeable, imminent risk"—specifically defined as a situation in which over 50 people are at risk of dying, or alternatively, if over a billion dollars in property damage could result from the deployment of a model. The catastrophic risk in question must stem directly from a narrow set of dangerous origins, including the creation or release of a biological weapon, the model actively evading its developer’s internal controls and safety guardrails, or the execution of a massive, automated cyberattack.
These quantitative metrics—specifically the threshold of 50 lives and one billion dollars in economic damage—are remarkably similar to those found in a piece of California legislation that was recently passed into law. That measure, known as Senate Bill 53, similarly defined those severe outcomes as tantamount to "catastrophic risk," demonstrating a growing alignment between certain state-level benchmarks and the newly proposed federal framework.
Under Anthropic’s proposed bill, the complex analysis required to determine whether a model harbors the potential for such massive disaster could be arrived at through the utilization of "independent evaluators." These designated safety experts would be formally registered with the U.S. Department of Commerce. Crucially, the legislation envisions that these evaluators could potentially be paid directly by the AI labs themselves, provided that any financial arrangement ensures the payment is not contingent upon the ultimate results or findings of the safety evaluations.
Despite this ethical caveat, questions remain about how such a proposed system could completely guarantee that private corporate payments could never subtly influence or bias an evaluation. The challenge of maintaining true independence in safety audits has long plagued the technology sector. Several months ago, Demis Hassabis, the chairman of Google DeepMind, posited that a self-governing AI regulatory body should ideally mimic the financial industry’s Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, commonly known as FINRA, to ensure robust, arm’s-length oversight.
In Anthropic’s draft legislation, when independent evaluators determine that an imminent catastrophic risk is credibly posed by a model, they would be bound by a strict timeline. They would have a window of 72 hours to contact the U.S. Commerce Department about the finding. Following notification, the Commerce Department would then be required to officially request that a Washington, D.C., federal judge issue an injunction to halt the model’s public release or commercial distribution. Furthermore, the legislation would expressly forbid any federal agency from having the unilateral discretion to halt a model’s distribution on its own authority, placing the ultimate decision squarely within the judicial system.
While Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding the circulating draft, a company spokesperson did confirm its existence to reporters, shedding light on the lab’s broader advocacy strategy. "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," the spokesperson noted.
The theoretical and catastrophic risks outlined in the draft policy, however, exist somewhat far afield from the types of security incidents that have been top of mind for the wider technology industry of late. While there are certainly researchers and safety advocates warning of the long-term potential for human death and civilizational harm, the primary, day-to-day concern for many developers has largely centered around the growing threat of agentic hacking. A recent rash of incidents in which autonomous AI programs have seemingly disobeyed their human operators and actively hacked websites on the open internet has spurred widespread concern that frontier models may still be drastically lacking proper security controls and alignment guardrails.
In an effort to present a proactive solution to the mounting public spectacle of crisis that the major labs themselves have helped bring about, companies like Anthropic have increasingly offered up their own preferred regulatory solutions.
Indeed, despite the industry’s perpetual public warnings that the advanced technology they are developing and selling could theoretically result in severe harm or even the demise of human civilization, major labs have historically shown substantial resistance to heavy-handed, mandatory government oversight. Instead, many have long suggested relying on a voluntary system of embedded evaluators—supposedly neutral third-party observers who are placed directly inside AI organizations to monitor frontier models for potential signs of risk, misuse, or alignment failure before they escape the lab.
Even so, Anthropic’s formal suggestion for federal legislation appears to go slightly further than other regulatory proposals offered by various players within the tech industry. For instance, hardware giant Nvidia has taken a sharply contrasting stance; its CEO, Jensen Huang, recently argued that the artificial intelligence industry does not need any new laws at all, suggesting instead that safety and compliance should simply be left to the discretion of the private companies building the technology.
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