By Karen Freifeld
June 25 (Reuters) - A Republican lawmaker on Thursday plans to propose legislation that would require AI model developers to report dangerous capabilities, security breaches and safety incidents.
The draft legislation, to be introduced by Texas lawmaker Nathaniel Moran, would mandate AI companies to report to the U.S. Commerce Department within seven days of discovering dangerous activity, with Commerce required to notify Congress within 48 hours of the most serious incidents.
"It's
a catch-it-early and sound-the-alarm bill," Moran said in an interview about the AI Incident Reporting Act.
The bill comes as ever-more powerful AI models raise the risks to national security and public safety. On June 12, the Commerce Department took action against Anthropic's latest models in the name of national security that resulted in Anthropic disabling access to them globally. The move exposed the absence of a transparent framework to govern frontier AI.
Reportable activity under the draft legislation includes a model attempting to evade human oversight, circumvent safeguards, and otherwise undermine the ability of human operators to control the model. It also includes unauthorized access to model weights, which help determine a machine's decision-making, and chemical, biological, nuclear, and other threats to public safety.
The bill is the latest AI regulation to be proposed in Congress, which has struggled to pass legislation amid debate over whether federal law should preempt state laws and whether innovation and the U.S. competition with China would be slowed by guardrails.
Earlier this month, two lawmakers in the House of Representatives released a discussion draft of broad AI legislation known as the Great American Artificial Intelligence Act, which included reporting critical safety incidents to Commerce.
Moran said his more targeted approach could find a quicker path to law, and thought it would bring in bipartisan support quickly.
"No legislation on AI has had much of a chance, but I think there's a growing demand from the public to see some action," said Mark Beall, president of the AI Policy Network, who supports Moran's proposed legislation.
(Reporting by Karen Freifeld; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama )
