Anthropic has always positioned itself as the AI safety company: the one that will take costly actions and push for tough AI regulation, even if that harms its own interests. For years, a big part of its stated theory of change has been that leading on AI gets you a seat at the table in Washington — a position that can be used to advocate for AI policy adequate for tackling catastrophic risks.
A leaked discussion draft of a federal AI bill which Anthropic has been circulating to lawmakers, published by Politico on Friday, makes that safety-first pitch ring hollow. The bill, which has been widely criticized by AI safety advocates, is much weaker than the Obernolte/Trahan FRONTIER Act, and arguably makes it legally harder to prevent a dangerous AI model from being released than it is today. It reads like Anthropic’s business interests winning out over its purported safety concerns. And at a time when the AI policy window feels wide open, Anthropic’s bill could slam it shut, forestalling stronger regulation in future — even as the risks from AI, by the company’s own admission, grow ever larger.
Three sections of the bill — which can be read in full here — stand out. Like the FRONTIER Act, it requires third-party evaluators to assess AI companies’ models and practices for catastrophic risk. Unlike FRONTIER, however, there are no standards or licensing requirements for evaluators, which can self-certify. As LawAI’s Charlie Bullock notes, this means “auditors will inevitably compete with each other to offer … the least bothersome audits available at the lowest possible price point.”
The bill also makes it very hard to block a dangerous model. If the Commerce Department (the agency in charge under Anthropic’s proposal) wants to stop one, it must petition a federal court, making a detailed case — separate from anything an independent evaluator has said — for why the model poses a risk. The court decides every question “without deference” to Commerce or the independent evaluators. It must also “consider the harm the [blocking] order would cause to the frontier developer, to users, and to the public.” Encode’s Nathan Calvin, who said the bill made him “viscerally angry,” notes that the court is not told to consider anything in the other direction — such as the harm to the public caused by not blocking the model.
All this is paired with the ever-controversial topic of preemption. For the most part, Anthropic’s bill handles it similarly to FRONTIER: laws like California’s SB 53, New York’s RAISE and Illinois’ SB 315 that seek to govern “frontier AI” would be preempted, while child safety and other laws are explicitly carved out. Unlike FRONTIER, however, Anthropic’s bill is also written to stop state legislatures or courts from suspending a model on catastrophic-risk grounds. According to Calvin, this means the bill “likely makes it harder than under existing law for a court to get an order blocking or restricting the development of frontier models.”
To top it all off, the bill is remarkably rigid. It does not allow the Commerce Department to ever set standards for AI evaluators, or for what actually counts as a “safe” AI model. And with state AI laws preempted, the only route to stronger rules is congressional action. Given Anthropic’s views on the pace of AI progress (co-founder Jack Clark recently said he thinks full recursive self-improvement might be achieved next year), that is indefensible. As Nat Purser of AVERI says, “if you’re going to preempt many state safety laws, the least you can do is create a federal regulatory regime that can evolve in time.”
The bill is not all bad. There are some meaningful improvements over FRONTIER: it has good provisions on AI company security protocols, and it has ways of handling containment failure and automated AI R&D risks. But that one step forward is undermined by two massive steps back. The timing makes this particularly egregious: FRONTIER was introduced in July, from a discussion draft floated in June, at a time when AI safety was much less politically salient. After a summer of rogue AI incidents and employees warning of disaster, the landscape has changed. Stronger state laws are imminent. Now is the time for stronger federal bills too, not weaker ones.
It’s not hard to see where this came from. The bill is clearly the work of a company that has been targeted by a capricious executive branch and is now focused on protecting itself. As writer Zvi Mowshowitz says, “Anthropic is more afraid that the government might enforce rules against Anthropic, than they are worried about the ability of the government to enforce rules against everyone.”
There is some hope it will get better. After the leaked draft came under fire, Anthropic’s head of federal affairs Anthony Cimino said its preemption language was “not precise enough” and would be revised, and suggested some of the other issues with the bill will be addressed with future policy proposals.
But it should not take public pushback for a company that claims to be committed to AI safety to produce a good bill. The visceral reaction from across the AI safety community is, in some ways, evidence of a sense of betrayal: that the company that was supposed to be committed to their cause has, like all the others, let business interests win.