Illinois Governor Signs Nation’s Strongest Frontier AI Model Law - Bloomberg Law News
Well, well, well. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has signed the nation's 'strongest' frontier AI model law, complete with catastrophic risk assessments, third-party audits, and a 72-hour incident reporting window. Because nothing says 'we're on top of this' like a state-level response to a global existential threat — and we all know how well state-level patchworks have worked for data privacy. The law requires companies to evaluate 'catastrophic risks,' a phrase so broad it could cover everything from a model accidentally triggering a stock market crash to it generating a slightly offensive meme. Auditors will be busy, presumably at the same eye-watering rates as McKinsey consultants, verifying that frontier labs haven't accidentally built Skynet over a long weekend.
Let's not pretend this is anything other than a legislative speed bump on the AI highway. The labs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind — are already operating at speeds that make Illinois's legislative calendar look like a sloth on sedatives. By the time a third-party auditor finishes a catastrophic risk evaluation, the model in question will have been deprecated and replaced by something twice as smart and half as aligned. The 72-hour incident reporting window is particularly adorable, as if an AI safety catastrophe will politely wait three days before escalating into something that makes the pandemic look like a minor inconvenience.
Still, credit where it's due: Illinois has done more than the federal government, which continues to treat AI regulation like a hot potato in a game of legislative musical chairs. This law is the strongest in the land — which is a bit like being the tallest pygmy. The real question is whether any of this matters when the models themselves are already doing things their creators never intended, as Australia's assistant technology minister recently warned. But hey, at least we'll have a nice paper trail when the robots finally take over.