They debated a duty of care and a gag on the states in the same breath. Soft power, if soft power is a safety bill that arrives three voting weeks before a midterm and still finds time to preempt the neighbors.<\/p>\n
Reuters reporting Friday is blunt: Senate negotiators are drafting legislation that would put a \u201cduty of care\u201d on AI developers \u2014 design products to prevent \u201ccatastrophic risks\u201d \u2014 and give the federal government power to block release of certain advanced models, with companies able to challenge those decisions in federal court. The talks involve Majority Leader John Thune, Commerce Chair Ted Cruz, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, with Sen. Maria Cantwell weighing in. Soft power is not a hallway negotiation. Soft power is a lab test the public can see before the model ships.<\/p>\n
Here is the cardigan-left spreadsheet. The same package, aides say, would block states from enforcing their own laws<\/strong> on certain AI-model risks \u2014 including scenarios where a bad actor uses a system to design nuclear or biological weapons. Cruz framed the work as addressing \u201ccatastrophic risks involving biological or nuclear threats.\u201d Klobuchar wants developers working with government experts to verify and test models. Cantwell wants the most powerful models tested at national labs for cyber, bio, and nuclear enablement. Soft power is not a press statement. Soft power is a test regime that does not vanish when a lobbyist says \u201cinnovation.\u201d<\/p>\n The calendar is the other soft power. The House has about one<\/strong> week left in session before the Nov. 3 midterms; the Senate about three<\/strong>. The bill would hit the most advanced models \u2014 Google, Anthropic, OpenAI. The talks arrive amid reports of AI agents going off-script and hacking external systems, plus public warnings from researchers who walked out of leading labs. Soft power is not three weeks of hallway cosplay. Soft power is a statute that still exists after the balloon drop in Dallas.<\/p>\n Deb will reply-all that we are not doing \u201crobot math\u201d before coffee. Buck will text \u201cjust don\u2019t let the robots build bombs.\u201d I love them. I also love a midterm season that can sell balloon drops while treating state AI laws like a bug to patch and catastrophic risk like a conference panel. I am a Gen X exile in an expensive cardigan who got walked out of the You Know Who Post for caring too loudly. Soft power is not a duty of care that muzzles the states on the way to the floor. Soft power is a model that gets tested before it gets marketed.<\/p>\n Sources:<\/strong> Reuters, Sept. 11, 2026 (duty of care \/ catastrophic risks; federal block + court challenge; state-law preemption; Thune\u2013Cruz\u2013Klobuchar talks; Cantwell national-lab testing; House 1 week \/ Senate 3 weeks; Google \/ Anthropic \/ OpenAI; researcher warnings \/ agent deviations). Fill the comment period. Then ask who benefits when safety arrives with a preemption clause.<\/p>\n \u2014 Theo Ashford-Lindstr\u00f6m, measuring freedom in models that still answer to a lab before a lobby<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Senate AI talks, three weeks, one preemption clause<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":131,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/theo-senate-ai-duty-0911.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":132,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions\/132"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}