OpenAI Warns of Confusion as Massachusetts Readies Crackdown

Ah, marvellous. Massachusetts lawmakers, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that the best way to bundle the apocalypse into an economic development bill is to demand that leading AI labs submit to independent reviews of 'catastrophic risks' from frontier models every 120 days. Because nothing says 'job creation' like a statutory timetable for the end of the world. One imagines the lab safety officer's calendar now reads like a bizarre MOT test: 'Apocalypse check due: 34 days.' The good people at Anthropic are delighted, calling it 'the clearest and strongest AI legislation in the country' — which, given the competition, is roughly like being crowned the tidiest deckchair on the Titanic.

OpenAI, meanwhile, warns that these reviews could slow the release of cybersecurity models. Slow them? Splendid. Because the one thing the cybersecurity AI market is desperately short of is more models, more rapidly. We have clearly learned nothing from the past two years except that when a company says 'we can't wait for a safety check, the hackers are coming,' you should probably check twice. And this is the company that the article itself says is warning of confusion as Massachusetts readies the crackdown — confusion, presumably, about why anyone would imagine that an existential-risk review could be rushed through in time for a product launch. If the reviews genuinely slow down the next 'cyber model'? That is surely a feature, not a bug — maybe we can all catch our breath while the pause button is held by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Still, credit where it's due: at least the state has chosen a concrete interval. The pattern is unmistakable: regulators are slowly, nervously beginning to act, and the labs are responding with the enthusiasm of toddlers being offered broccoli. A 120-day cycle for existential-risk review is either the most reasonable thing a legislature has proposed in years, or the most optimistic — and at this point I've been in this game long enough to assume it will be gamed, watered down, and renamed 'model confidence attestation' within a single parliamentary session.