Congress Moves at Tech Pace: The FRONTIER Act

Crossposted from canaryinstitute.ai/blog/frontier-act-tech-pace . Related posts The Best AI Bill Congress Hasn't Introduced Yet — my section-by-section read of the GAAIA discussion draft this bill grew out of; this post assumes you've at least skimmed it. Just two days ago I wrote about the Great American AI Act (GAAIA), a 269-page discussion draft that struck me as "the best AI bill that Congress hasn't introduced yet". I ended by hoping that Congress might start moving at tech pace, rather than policy pace; I didn't expect that to change this soon, but it has. On July 23, Representatives Obernolte and Trahan, joined by four bipartisan cosponsors (Peters, Franklin, Subramanyam, and Houchin), introduced the frontier-oversight core of GAAIA as a real bill: the Frontier Risk Oversight, National Transparency, Independent Evaluation, and Reporting (FRONTIER) Act. Someone really, really worked for that acronym, and I salute them. Seven weeks from discussion draft to introduced legislation is fast for Congress on anything; for AI, where the complaint is that they've been asleep at the wheel, it's astounding. This wasn't a panic bill scribbled over a weekend; the revision shows seven weeks of actual work, with gaps closed, clocks tightened, and new teeth added. The sponsor statements make it clear that they were watching the same news as the rest of us. The world has far fewer skeptics this week than it had last week. Last week AI oversight was somewhere between "fringe issue" and…