Anthropic Floats Bill That Would Let Feds Step In Only When More Than 50 Lives Are On The Line– dailycaller.com

One of the biggest artificial intelligence developers wants the federal government to be able to halt its models only when a catastrophe is imminent.

A draft federal AI safety bill pitched by Anthropic, tentatively called the Artificial Intelligence Evaluation, Governance, and Incident Safety (AEGIS) Act, would let the Commerce Department seek a court order to pause an AI model only when it threatens to kill or seriously injure more than 50 people or cause over $1 billion in damages, according to a copy of the bill’s draft. Anthony Cimino, Anthropic’s head of federal affairs, defended these thresholds on X Sunday.

“The term ‘enumerated risk’ means a foreseeable and material risk that a frontier developer’s development, storage, use, or deployment of a frontier model will materially contribute to the death of, or serious injury to, more than 50 people, or to more than $1,000,000,000 in damage to, or more than $1,000,000,000 in loss of, property, arising from a single incident involving the frontier model,” the Sept. 29 draft of the AEGIS Act stated in part.

“The threshold in our draft language pulled directly from existing standards in California law,” Cimino stated on X in part, responding to Encode AI general counsel Nathan Calvin’s dissatisfaction with the proposed bill. “Also, this threshold does not absolve companies of liability, or restrict any of the other tools that the government has to protect the public.”