Anthropic quietly pitches lawmakers on draft AI safety bill, Politico reports

Illustrative photo. Source: George Munger / Wikimedia Commons.

The draft would allow the government to block a frontier AI model’s release or use only if it poses a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages or of killing or seriously injuring more than 50 people.

Anthropic representatives have privately pitched Capitol Hill lawmakers on the draft bill, Politico reported Friday, citing three people familiar with the effort.

This is reported by Reuters.

According to the report, the risk would have to stem from the creation or release of a biological weapon, a model evading its developer’s controls, or a cyberattack. Anthropic and the US Department of Commerce did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

The bill would require independent evaluators registered with the Commerce Department to periodically assess the AI lab and its frontier models. Labs could pay the evaluators, as long as payment was not tied to the outcome. If evaluators found an “imminent enumerated risk” in a company’s frontier models, they would have to notify Commerce within 72 hours of completing their assessment, Politico reported.

The Commerce Department could ask a judge to halt a model after determining that it posed a risk. But the bill explicitly bars any other US government department, agency or officer from suspending a model’s development, deployment or internal use. A federal judge for the District Court for the District of Columbia could order a model’s suspension, according to the report.

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