This is obviously true, but “what is the best response that we can actually pass” is at least as important a question as “what is the theoretically optimal legislative response assuming no political constraints.” I think that introducing a *bipartisan* bill as strong as FRONTIER back in July was an incredible achievement that Reps. Obernolte and Trahan deserve a lot of credit for. Things have changed since then, obviously, which is why FRONTIER now has six cosponsors from each party. I think someone should write and introduce the best possible federal pacing bill, in part because it might actually become possible to pass such a bill at some point in the next couple years if we get a lot of new information that makes that proposal more politically compelling. But we also have to write the best oversight + governance bills that we can, because in a lot of likely-seeming political paradigms those are going to be the bills that can actually pick up four republican senators and open up the possibility of a deal being made with the President. If you’re a really cracked lawyer who is or could be good at writing legislation, I think you should consider the question of whether you have a moral obligation to work on this stuff. A lot of new and incumbent members of congress are going to be hiring staffers to work on AI legislation very soon. A lot of states are currently hiring the people who will actually be tasked with implementing and enforcing the first serious laws governing frontier AI development. Lots of work to be done.

The Trahan-Obernolte discussion draft text has dropped. I'm going to publish a longer and more carefully considered piece on this in the near future, but quick takes for twitter: I think the substance of the catastrophic risk provisions (IVO-style auditing and SB 53-style transparency, both with fairly robust rulemaking authority; incident reporting; whistleblower protections) is quite good, for the most part. Not absolutely perfect, but better than any other federal cat-risk bill that's been introduced so far. Unfortunately, I also think that the preemption (all state laws regulating development) is far too broad, and that this makes the bill as drafted a bad deal overall. Currently, you're preempting (for example) a broad range of state child safety laws, in exchange for a federal framework that (from what I've seen so far; I have not yet read all 270 pages) doesn't include substantial federal child safety protections. And it's not just child safety, it's every possible current or future state law that regulates development. If you narrowed the preemption to avoid that kind of asymmetry between the policies you're implementing federally and the policies you're eliminating at the state level, I think I would strongly support a bill like this. It doesn't have to be completely 1:1, necessarily; something like @deanwball's proposal, which preempted five specific categories of state law in exchange for federal transparency, might be good enough (depending on the details). Tl;dr. -- the draft is quite good on substance, but quite bad on preemption, and therefore (IMO) a bad deal overall. My hope is that it's a step in the right direction, and that as discussion continues the preemption section can evolve into something that makes more sense in terms of both politics and policy.