Cruz blocks Senate Democrats’ effort to pass AI safety bill

Senator Ted Cruz blocked a Democratic push to advance sweeping AI safety legislation on September 29, killing the bill’s path through unanimous consent on the Senate floor. The Artificial Intelligence Risk Management and Security Act of 2026, sponsored by Senators Mark Warner, Brian Schatz, and Andy Kim, would have created a permanent AI Safety Board inside the Department of Commerce with real enforcement teeth. Cruz, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, objected on the grounds that the bill would hand the federal government what he described as “unbound discretion” in regulating private AI companies. What the bill would have done The bill would have established an AI Safety Board within the Commerce Department, empowered to enforce compliance standards for frontier AI models. The most consequential provision: developers would have been required to grant the board access to their models a full 45 days before any public release. The bill emerged partly in response to warnings from AI researchers and a string of security breaches at major labs. Warner, Schatz, and Kim framed it as a necessary guardrail for technologies that are evolving faster than the government’s ability to un...