Khanna to introduce AI safety bill awaiting technology safeguards

Rep. Ro Khanna is introducing an AI safety bill, and the timing could not be more exquisitely accidental. The legislation would ban 'recursive' self-improving AI until the government creates safeguards — a clause that sounds decisive until you spot that the safeguard and the thing being safeguarded are administered by the same people. Last week the New York Times reported that governments are being left behind by AI. Khanna's answer is to make the cavalry's arrival a precondition for the ban.

The bill creates a new federal agency to oversee models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind and xAI — four labs written into the statute like a licensing schedule for the frontier. It promises safety regulations, a licensing system, frontier model audits and human-control standards. A licensing regime for models that ship in three-week cycles is a passport office for a species that will not hold still. Strict liability is the boldest flourish: prove, in court, that one specific model caused one specific harm, in a system where the labs themselves cannot tell you why the weights did what they did.

Anthropic — one of the four labs written into the bill — devoted 80 of its 261 IPO prospectus pages, as we noted at the time, to warning that this technology might pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity, so the industry has drafted its disaster clause and would simply prefer a congressman didn't file it. Khanna is doing the traditional Washington thing: legislating the outline of a thing before anybody agrees on the physics. The bill may pass; the ban may even take effect, on that glorious afternoon when the agency that doesn't yet exist finishes safeguarding a field it cannot yet measure. The models, meanwhile, will keep improving — recursively or otherwise — and the only safeguard we will actually have is the headline.