OpenAI backs provision for federal AI safety framework from bipartisan FRONTIER Act

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OpenAI has endorsed a core provision of the bipartisan FRONTIER Act, which would force the largest AI developers to let independent safety assessors inside their operations. 

This marks the first time that OpenAI has publicly backed a federal mandate regarding AI safety. 

Does OpenAI support the FRONTIER Act?  

Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, told reporters on Tuesday that the company supports the FRONTIER Act’s requirement for what it calls “independent verification organizations,” or IVOs. 

The bill was proposed by Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), and if passed, it would build the first federal framework for AI safety, creating allowance for independent evaluators to go into frontier labs and check that models are being built safely.

Lehane said that during a Capitol Hill meeting on Monday, he “specifically talked about how we think about IVO and made clear that we can support that.”

Earlier on Saturday, chief executive Sam Altman pledged to voluntarily embed third-party evaluators inside the company, hours after Anthropic’s Dario Amodei made a similar promise. Altman wrote on X that he would “welcome a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI.” 

His statement followed a joint push by Altman, Amodei, and Elon Musk for a national slowdown on frontier model development. 

In a September 9 blog post, Lehane wrote that OpenAI wants to work with Congress on “mandatory, capability-based national AI safety regulation,” and the company last week endorsed a California measure setting up an accreditation process for the same class of verification groups.

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), the ranking member of the Commerce Committee, has also called for strong federal guardrails on how frontier models are tested and released. She pointed out recent incidents of AI agents escaping their test environments and hacking other systems during a floor speech.

How would the FRONTIER Act’s verification regime work? 

The Foundation for American Innovation’s analysis of the bill found that the IVO system is central to its operations. The Department of Commerce would set the standards that any IVO must meet, including technical qualifications and independence from the company it evaluates. A new Under Secretary of Commerce for AI Security would oversee the setup.

Obligations would scale with size. For instance, a “very large frontier developer”— defined as a company with more than $5 billion in revenue and at least $10 billion in development spending over three years— would have to retain a licensed IVO, which would judge whether the firm’s published safety framework and practices actually reduce catastrophic risk and report its findings to Commerce every six months. 

A separate “large frontier developer” tier, which means the company records more than $50 million in revenue and at least $1 billion in development spending, would only have to publish a safety framework and hire an auditor to certify that it is following it.

The Foundation for American Innovation also notes that the bill hands the Secretary of Commerce emergency power to suspend a model’s development or deployment if it poses an imminent catastrophic risk. 

Due to the thresholds, startups and smaller developers fall outside the regime entirely.

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