Bipartisan U.S. AI Bill Would Regulate Frontier Labs and Preempt State Rules

A bipartisan discussion draft in the House, the Great American Artificial Intelligence Act of 2026, would create the first broad U.S. federal framework for regulating frontier AI developers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta. The proposal would require large model developers to publish safety and governance frameworks, issue transparency and incident reports, assess catastrophic risks, and undergo semiannual independent audits or verification. The bill defines catastrophic risks to include mass-casualty harms, major property damage, cyberattacks, CBRN weapon assistance, and loss-of-control scenarios, while also formalizing the Center for AI Standards and Innovation and funding it at $100 million annually from fiscal 2027 through 2029.

The draft would also block states for three years from specifically regulating AI model development, a provision that drew immediate criticism from opponents who say it could suppress stronger state protections even as it preserves generally applicable state laws and post-deployment oversight. Beyond model governance, the measure would extend the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act through 2035, direct DHS to support small and rural critical infrastructure operators, fund open-source software maintainers using frontier models for vulnerability discovery and patching, and establish AI testbeds across federal labs and private partners to evaluate threats including autonomous offensive cyber capabilities and risks to critical infrastructure.