Cyberattacks, murder and loss of control: Inside Massachusetts' AI bill

The Massachusetts state Senate has finally found something more depressing than a Patriots loss: debating an AI bill that sets the bar for catastrophic risk at 'death of over 50 people.' Because nothing says 'responsible regulation' like a threshold that suggests a mere 49 casualties is just a Tuesday. The bill would require large AI developers to identify worst-case scenarios—as if the companies that brought us 'hallucinating chatbots' and 'data leaks as a service' are suddenly going to become paragons of risk management. And who exactly will verify these self-assessments? The same state that can't get the T running on time?

And the $75 million authorization for AI development? That's the Bay State's idea of real investment, roughly the cost of a single mediocre MLB player's annual salary. Meanwhile, the tech giants spend billions quarterly on compute clusters that could be used to train models capable of—you guessed it—causing over 50 deaths. The bill's authors deserve credit for at least trying, but it's like putting a plaster on a bullet wound while hemorrhaging billions in AI investments elsewhere. The $75 million is a rounding error in the context of frontier model training runs that cost hundreds of millions.

The debate itself seems to have been filled with the usual performative hand-wringing, while the real race to the bottom continues unregulated. One can almost hear the collective sigh from Boston: 'Sure, why not mandate risk identification, just like we mandate snow tires—ineffective but comforting.' The real tragedy isn't the bill's substance but its irrelevance—by the time Massachusetts figures out what to regulate, the AIs will have already read this article and learned to obfuscate. But hey, at least the legislative machine is churning, producing something that feels like action while the frontier models quietly approach the 50-fatality threshold in their training runs.