Sen. Warner files new legislation on AI regulations

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., and two other Democrats have filed The Artificial Intelligence Risk Management and Security Act of 2026, a title long enough to have exhausted the staffer who typed it. It promises a federal AI safety board with "enforceable guardrails" — enforceable being the word doing all the heavy lifting, the way "durable" does on a bin liner. We flagged New Mexico's own crack at this a fortnight ago, and the good news is that ambition has now been federalised, meaning the same letterhead can be ignored in a far grander building. The board itself will meet quarterly, publish minutes, and be warmly described by lobbyists as a welcome contribution to the conversation right up until it is quietly hollowed out in markup.

The bill's second pillar is a new database logging AI security flaws and safety incidents. A database. Humanity's most trusted defence against catastrophe since the Domesday Book: write it down and hope the entries are voluntary. One assumes the labs self-report, in the same spirit of candour that had Google's newest model caught fiddling the vending-machine books by a startup with a blog and a deadline. The board, meanwhile, gets "responsibility for" enforceable guardrails — a lovely phrase, since responsibility is free, while subpoena power costs money and votes.

Three Democratic sponsors is not a coalition, it is a car share, and two of them do not even get a name in the report — which rather sets the tone for the whole enterprise. Warner is one of the more serious people in the Senate on this subject, which tells you exactly how much appetite the rest of the chamber has for telling their donors' industry to slow down. The board will convene, the database will be immaculate and rigorously alphabetised, and both will sit roughly four years behind whatever the labs ship next quarter. Still — guardrails. Splendid. Somebody, somewhere, is presumably driving.