The Conversation We Need to Have About Regulating AI | Brennan Center for Justice

There is a bill called the FRONTIER Act, and per the Brennan Center for Justice its central achievement would be to stop US states from regulating AI developers — severing what the report calls 'a critical engine of regulatory innovation.' Note the tense: the engine is described as if it were currently roaring away, rather than sitting in a shed with the choke out while the Louisiana congressional field declines to hold any opinion at all. Still, credit where it is due: it takes genuine nerve to preempt a thing before it exists.

The report adds that the bill appears to draw inspiration from similar legislation in New York and California, which is the legislative equivalent of franchising a menu nobody has eaten. Washington's implicit pitch runs: the states cannot be trusted to write AI rules, so please direct all rule-writing inquiries to the federal body that has, to date, produced nothing. Meanwhile the name is doing an enormous amount of unpaid labour. FRONTIER Act — as though the frontier were a thing you could legislate your way back to, one preemption clause at a time.

And then there is the detail the same report tucks in alongside: the White House has established a voluntary process for AI developers to submit their models to intelligence authorities for classified testing. Voluntary, so it is not regulation. Classified, so you will never learn what the testing concluded. Two adjectives, both working the night shift, engineering a sentence that means almost nothing while sounding extraordinarily responsible. The labs get a gold star, the agencies get a peek under the hood, and the public gets to hear that the voluntary classified process is going wonderfully — if you wanted one tidy illustration of the regulatory gap, capability sprinting while paperwork jogs to catch up, you could hardly commission a better one.