(2026-10-17) Zvim Leaked Anthropic Draft Ai Regulatory Bill Is Unacceptable And Troubling

Zvi Mowshowitz: Leaked Anthropic Draft AI Regulatory Bill Is Unacceptable and Troubling. There is a newly leaked bill that Anthropic is purportedly shopping around. It is similar to the FRONTIER Act, with stronger preemption of state laws, stronger transparency provisions and weaker enforcement provisions.

Having slept on this, I find it unacceptable that Anthropic is actively shopping exactly the type of bill I have warned we will need to fight against during the lame duck session.

This reads as intentional

Anthropic’s policy team seems to have, chosen protecting their business interests and guarding against their political risk, at the expense of safety considerations.

*This seems like the bill that someone on the anti-regulatory side should be pushing. It is not obvious this makes us safer than doing nothing, even if the alternative is fully nothing at all levels.

Say it isn't so, Anthropic, or at least that it was a mistake and is no longer so, or I am going to be rather cross.*

I am at a conference and cannot do an RTFB, but it feels important to get word of this out quickly

Others RTFB (Read the Bill)

they did not like what they saw

Nathan Calvin: Charlie’s analysis is right but he is nicer than I am - I found myself viscerally angry at multiple points reading this bill. There are some good and sensible parts, but overall this legislation is not remotely close to meeting the moment

Why Would Anthropic Do This?

The new Anthropic bill is weaker than their June framework, and offers both forward-looking and backward-looking preemption in exchange, despite months of movement to enable us to do more. What are we even doing?

Alex Bores: Anthropic is pitching a bill that closely matches its framework from June. How can you watch Hugging Face, Coxon, & rogue AI swarms, and conclude that the bill you cooked up in June is sufficient

Well, I know what it looks like Anthropic is prioritizing. The silly mistakes are a known and acceptable hazard, but there are things that really should not have made it into a bill that is being pitched to lawmakers.

Not Everything Here Is Bad But Oh Boy

*As noted above, there are some good individual provisions. I like the broader coverage, that thresholds can move both ways, required risk reports and annual audits. The whistleblower provisions and security requirements seem strong.

Putting automated AI R&D into the list of risks is very cool and necessary.*

The maximally charitable reading is that doing anything is a tough sell even now, and the White House wants no bill, so you have to give and take and this is as good as one can hope to do modulo fixing its bugs.

Anthropic needs to course correct, quickly. Earlier yesterday I already expressed, here at the conference I am at, that ‘what Anthropic would go for’ looks like a limiting factor in what we can achieve. And, well, here we are.