Anthropic’s draft AI bill draws fire for setting a high bar on federal action

Anthropic, the company behind the Claude family of AI models, has handed US lawmakers a draft federal bill on frontier AI safety. It is the company’s own blueprint for how Washington should police companies like Anthropic. Critics are not impressed. One opinion piece calls the proposal a fairly transparent attempt to calm public fears that Anthropic’s own people helped stoke, and argues that governments, not AI firms, should be writing the rules. What the draft actually says The confidential proposal was drafted in mid-October 2026. It has not been formally introduced as legislation, so for now it is a pitch, not a law. The core of the bill is a set of thresholds. The federal government could block the release or use of an advanced AI model only if it posed a foreseeable, imminent risk of more than $1 billion in damages. The other trigger is human harm. Regulators could step in if a model threatened to kill or seriously injure more than 50 people. Not every kind of danger counts, either. The risks covered are limited to three scenarios: a model helping create or release a biological weapon, a model slipping out of its developer’s control, or a cyberattack. Who holds the off switch ...