US Senate negotiators consider requiring AI firms to mitigate known major risks - Reuters

The US Senate is debating a bill that would require tech companies to design AI products to prevent 'catastrophic risks' — the federal sibling to the state-level guardrail push we noted earlier. Look at what lives inside those scare quotes. Reuters wraps 'catastrophic risks' in apostrophes because nobody involved has bothered to define it, and nobody has named a model, a threshold, or an agency that would do the naming. It is a design mandate pointed directly at a fog.

The proposal would also give the government power to block the release of certain models deemed unsafe — deemed by the government, a body currently campaigning on its inability to staff the agencies that would do the deeming. If a lab objects, the matter would go to federal courts. Splendid — nothing conveys urgency about a technology that ships in months like a preliminary injunction calendar measured in quarters. By the time the docket clears, the model in question will be a vintage curiosity and someone in a garage will have replicated it for the price of a GPU rental.

Then there is the sourcing. The details come from 'Senate aides and a lobbyist', which is the exact three-legged stool on which every ambitious safety framework has been invited to sit down and shut up. A lobbyist has spoken to Reuters about a bill that would regulate the lobbyist's industry, and we are meant to receive that as reporting rather than a weather forecast; you can almost hear the drafting session — define nothing, promise everything, book the press conference. The bill may be sincerely intended, but it will leave the negotiating room with 'catastrophic' still meaning 'whatever we would prefer to announce ourselves, on a Tuesday, with a keynote and a lighting rig'. Still, a design mandate aimed at unknown harms is at least a written promise, which is more than most labs have volunteered.