JJ (@jjbalisan@sigmoid.social)

Representatives Obernolte and Trahan have unveiled the FRONTIER Act. It’s an improvement from their previous Great American AI Act, although there are still some big important changes that need to be made. I’ll go through the good and bad here. The good: - It would create the most comprehensive AI auditing system of any bill that I’ve seen. It would require certain very large AI developers to have third party auditors assess not only whether they followed the law but also whether they had achieved acceptable levels of catastrophic risk mitigation, along with recommended changes to achieve acceptable levels of catastrophic risk mitigation. The company would then have to respond, and the auditor would then have to evaluate that response. Theoretically, these audits could be extremely frequent, as the auditor has the ability to choose the audit cadence, and the Department of Commerce can also set rules for it. That being said, auditors that did this would probably be at a disadvantage in the marketplace and the Department of Commerce is unlikely to do that. The Department would also license auditors, which helps prevent a race to the bottom. - It would require the Department of Commerce to establish minimum requirements for the frontier AI frameworks of large AI developers within 180 days. This is great! As state laws have mandated frontier AI frameworks, we’ve seen companies make them extremely barebones because there are not (yet) any minimum standards. This could fix that, if Commerce wrote good rules. - It borrows most of the important provisions from state bills like SB 53, the RAISE Act, and SB 315, including transparency provisions, incident reporting, and internal use reporting. - There is a new emergency powers authority for the Secretary of Commerce to halt dangerous company activities if they are creating catastrophic risk. It provides for an appeals process for companies. Importantly, it applies not only to external deployments but also to internal use, which is quite important! The bad: - Companies still get to choose their own auditors, and we don’t know whether regulations will be passed to change this. This will naturally lead to companies choosing the most lenient licensed auditor available, and could undermine the largest benefits of the bill. There should probably be random assignments of auditors to companies, or another more substantial effort to mitigate this issue. This is probably the trickiest issue to manage for a bill that leans heavily on IVOs. - Incident reports are barebones. Similar to state laws, only a very small set of incidents are required to be reported; for example, I don’t think the recent OpenAI incident would have to be reported. And companies have to provide very little information on incidents they do report. There’s no way for Commerce to update reportable incidents through regulation. - Continuous embedding of auditors at companies shouldn’t just be an option, it should be required for the largest AI developers. If there is no continuous embedding of auditors, they’ll likely miss new risks that arise rapidly between assessment reports. - Auditors need to be provided access to “unredacted materials, records, personnel, systems, and all other information reasonably necessary” to do their jobs, but there’s no provision requiring rulemaking around this and there will predictably be many fights. This would be helped by a rulemaking requirement with a stronger standard, such as a standard requiring auditors to get access to all safety-relevant information that executives and company safety teams have access to. - Rulemaking on definitions like “frontier model” and “very large frontier developer” can only adjust thresholds up. Thresholds can’t be adjusted down, nor can new metrics be devised that take further scientific progress into account. I think this could end up being a large issue if models trained below 10^26 FLOP pose risks, which I think in many ways they already do (although public, definitive evidence for FLOP is now unfortunately scant). - There aren’t any provisions on monitoring for AI research and development automation. Given the fact that major AI companies are already doing this kind of automation, I think a frontier bill should really have provisions on this. - Weirdly, the requirement from the initial version of the bill to describe how a developer carries out “managing catastrophic risk resulting from the internal utilization of such model, including such risk from such model circumventing an oversight mechanism” was removed. I think now is an odd time to be removing provisions about internal use. - Only the initial audit reports, but not company responses or auditor evaluation of those responses, have to be published. This is a miss for public transparency. - Auditor recommendations are not required to be implemented by companies, and there’s no way for Commerce to require them either except through slow-moving rulemaking or an emergency order. The bill would still preempt all state laws around preventing catastrophic risk from AI, including future laws (although the preemption is narrower than the original draft, which would have preempted more than that). That remains a high price to pay because it would centralize authority into a single US federal government department, which could use that authority well or poorly. In this bill, the main thing stopping an AI company from causing catastrophic harm in this legislation are the auditors, and it's ultimately unclear how good they'd be. Overall, I’m happy to see more members of Congress taking catastrophic risk from AI seriously and putting serious work into legislative design. I expect significant additional movement in the coming months and years. Eventually, something will pass. I hope whatever does will contain the good elements from this bill and avoid the bad.