Bipartisan House duo welcomes industry support for AI safety proposal

A pair of lawmakers from opposite sides of the aisle just got a notable endorsement for their attempt to bring federal order to the AI Wild West. OpenAI publicly backed key provisions of the FRONTIER Act on September 15, 2026, specifically the bill’s requirement that independent verification organizations evaluate AI safety. The FRONTIER Act, formally designated H.R. 9925, was introduced on July 23, 2026 by Rep. Jay Obernolte, a California Republican, and Rep. Lori Trahan, a Massachusetts Democrat. Its core ambition: replace the growing patchwork of state-level AI regulations with a single, coherent federal standard for the most powerful AI models being developed today. What the bill actually does The legislation creates a tiered regulatory framework that focuses specifically on larger AI developers. To fall under the bill’s jurisdiction, a company needs to exceed $50 million in revenue and have spent more than $1 billion on AI development over a 36-month period. The bill also introduces a precise technical definition for what counts as a “frontier model.” Any AI system requiring more than 10^26 compute operations for training qualifies. Developers who meet these criteria would fac...