Is 10²⁵ FLOPs Still the Frontier? A new Anthropic-written safety bill is circulating on Capitol Hill. Some of its ideas could be reasonable if limited to true frontier companies. As written, however, it will eventually sweep in most of Silicon Valley, damaging the startup ecosystem. The bill defines the “frontier” as any model trained on 10²⁵ FLOPs — the EU standard from 2023. Biden’s executive order, California’s SB 53, and New York’s RAISE Act used 10²⁶ (ten times more). 10²⁷ is where the frontier actually is today (e.g., GPT-6 Astra). Astra was reportedly trained on 100,000+ Grace Blackwell GPUs. A 10²⁵ model can be trained on as few as several hundred GB300 chips in three months. That is not frontier in 2026. The definition is also cumulative: it adds FLOPs from fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, or other material modifications. In practice, that captures almost all meaningful post-training — work that is becoming commonplace in the enterprise. The enterprise trend is toward thousands of smaller custom models built for specific workloads. These pose no frontier risk. Treating them as frontier systems would impose large compliance costs across corporate America for no safety gain. Dario has claimed that Anthropic designs rules to disadvantage frontier companies like his own while advantaging smaller competitors. This definition does the opposite. A stale 2023 cutoff favors incumbents who already clear the bar and can absorb the costs. It hobbles the open model ecosystem that threatens Anthropic’s pricing power. The frontier keeps moving. Any definition meant to track risk should move with it. Anthropic should clarify if they really believe 10²⁵ FLOPs represents the frontier.

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