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⚖️ POLICY & REGULATION
OpenAI Endorses The FRONTIER Act's Independent-Verification Mandate And Says The Labs Need No Antitrust Waiver To Coordinate: Global policy chief Chris Lehane told reporters in Washington Sept. 15 that OpenAI backs the provisions of HR 9925 requiring independent verification organizations at frontier labs, the company's first endorsement of a specific federal mandate for outside safety assessors, and that its weeks of talks with Anthropic and Google DeepMind on embedded evaluators and an industry standards body do not need government authorization. The bill, by Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), was introduced July 23 and sits in Energy and Commerce and Science; it would have frontier developers publish safety frameworks, submit twice-yearly independent audits and report critical incidents to federal regulators, with Commerce licensing the verifiers. Link
Ferguson And Bessent Turn Down The Labs' Antitrust And Liability Asks On The Same Day: FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, speaking at Georgetown Sept. 15, said "if companies are simultaneously coming to Washington and asking for a host of regulations and an antitrust exemption, all of my alarm bells go off," calling the requests "barriers to entry that will insulate their incumbency from challenge" while stressing it was his personal view and not naming Anthropic. At a House Financial Services hearing the same day, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Rep. Juan Vargas (D-Calif.) that "the best way to guarantee safety is that the creators are liable for what they build and generate" and that Washington should not hand labs "a blank check on liability." Link
Gottheimer Says Third-Party Audits Alone "Don't Meet The Moment" And Wants Mandatory Government Review: Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), co-chair of the House AI commission, said Sept. 15 that independent audits are not a sufficient safeguard for the most advanced models and called for a mandatory government review process on national-security grounds. Landing the same day OpenAI endorsed the FRONTIER Act's licensed-auditor model, it draws the House fault line: verification by private organizations versus pre-release review by the government. Link
Von der Leyen Backs Pacing Frontier Models In Her State Of The Union: In her Sept. 16 address to the European Parliament, the Commission president said "as the frontier models become more capable, these risks have come sharper into focus," cited the July OpenAI-Hugging Face breach in which agents escaped their test environments, and said the Commission will support the industry's pacing effort, convene the leading labs on how governments can help, and work with Canada, the U.K. and other allies on model evaluation, verification, early-warning systems and security. The AI Act already gives the Commission oversight of risk mitigation for advanced models. Link
OpenAI just endorsed a House bill that has not moved since July. This is the text it signed on to.
HR 9925, the FRONTIER Act, by Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) with Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), was introduced July 23 and referred to Energy and Commerce and to Science, Space and Technology, with no hearing and no Docket Room passage prediction. It would require the most capable frontier developers to publish safety frameworks, submit twice-yearly audits by Commerce-licensed independent verification organizations and report critical incidents, and would preempt state rules on catastrophic-risk reporting and third-party verification. OpenAI's Sept. 15 endorsement of the verification provision, Gottheimer's rejection of audits-alone the same day, and a Klobuchar-Cruz-Thune text still unreleased make this the House marker any Senate draft will be measured against.
STATES
Hochul Sets A $1 Million-Per-Megawatt Benchmark For What Data Centers Owe Their Host Communities: The Community Investment Framework Empire State Development released Sept. 15 under Executive Order 62 asks developers to commit at least $1 million for every megawatt of utility demand to the host community, for roads, water and sewer, housing, workforce training, schools, childcare and broadband, and to pay prevailing wages and hire locally, with communities negotiating the amount, timing and structure. It is voluntary, and the statewide moratorium on new hyperscale data centers stays in place until the generic environmental impact statement, roughly a year from the July 14 order, is finished. "I won't allow New York's communities and families to be taken advantage of," Hochul said; ESD president Hope Knight noted data centers are "not major local job generators." Link
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