Person
Democratic US senator from Minnesota, long active on technology and competition legislation.
Sen. Ted Cruz blocked a bill giving a federal board 45-day pre-release access to frontier AI models as six AI firms signed Trump's voluntary accord. Until Congress returns, oversight of those models runs through auditors and board committees the companies agreed to appoint.
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New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin's bills would let residents sue AI vendors over jailbroken tools, with all 51 members hearing them October 5. Tied to sales in the city, the duty would reach vendors ahead of any federal rule, though a pending Senate bill would likely override most state AI laws.
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Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon shared a Washington stage on Tuesday to press Congress for binding AI limits. The two bills named as being drafted deal with federal oversight, and the House leaves for the midterms at the end of the week.
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Anthropic's Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman and xAI's Elon Musk have asked Washington to regulate them. The White House answer, and the federal record since 2023, leave product teams designing against documents they wrote themselves.
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OpenAI's top strategist calls state lawmaking reverse federalism while a super PAC its president funds spends to override the states. The substantive ask holds in both venues: fund testing, and do not require approval before a model ships.
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Mike Johnson said Congress would vote tomorrow if it had the solution. He is still sending the House home after this week until after the November elections. He proposed a meeting of chief executives instead.
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Reuters reports that Thune, Cruz and Klobuchar are drafting a duty of care for developers of the most capable AI models plus a federal power to block unsafe releases. Maria Cantwell is holding out over who runs the tests.
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A researcher's resignation from Anthropic has produced real legislative momentum for binding federal AI rules. The bill now moving would make frontier developers answer in court for releases they failed to test.
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Senate negotiators want catastrophic-risk prevention written into law for the most advanced models, with the government able to stop a release. The reporting names three American developers inside that perimeter.
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Reuters reported that Senate negotiators Thune, Cruz and Klobuchar are discussing a duty of care that would let the federal government bar release of an unsafe frontier model, leaving developers to challenge a ban in federal court.
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Ted Cruz says he is writing AI catastrophic-risk legislation with John Thune and Amy Klobuchar, while on the same day the Pentagon's chief technology officer and President Trump both dismissed the extinction warnings behind it.
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