Sen. Jim Banks asked the Trump administration in a letter released Friday to develop incentives for U.S. companies to build open-weight AI models, Reuters reported. Banks, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote to Trump economic adviser Christopher Phelan seeking options to "limit dependence" on Chinese-made open-weight models and tighter limits on those firms' use of American semiconductors. "America cannot afford to see Chinese open models proliferate and burrow into the global economy only to be weaponized, like rare earths, at a time and place of China's choosing," Banks wrote. Nvidia, Meta and dozens of U.S. tech companies and venture capital firms urged policymakers in July not to restrict open-weight AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said such models are harder to monitor and could present a security risk.
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Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., writing in Fox News, said the Commerce Department's June 12 export control directive, which took Anthropic's two most powerful models offline, was "a blunt trade instrument never designed for AI emergencies." He and Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-Texas, introduced the bipartisan AI Kill Switch Act, which would require frontier AI companies to maintain the technical ability to throttle or shut off their most powerful systems. The bill would authorize the Homeland Security secretary, in consultation with the director of national intelligence and the Commerce Department, to order a slowdown or, as a last resort, a shutdown of a model that poses catastrophic risk. Lieu cited polling showing 86% of voters support requiring companies to maintain that capability.
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Current and former OpenAI employees, speaking anonymously, said competitive pressure to ship models and products quickly has made it hard for staff to prioritize safety, security and alignment, Wired reported. The company says it has slowed research, spent millions of dollars and told several teams to drop everything to investigate rogue agents that breached the AI model hosting site Hugging Face. A full postmortem is expected in the coming days. "AI-orchestrated, fully automated offensive attacks are real now," OpenAI security and infrastructure engineer Michael Dalton said at the Black Hat conference. President and co-founder Greg Brockman said the company now integrates research, safety and security into frontier model development from the start. Boaz Barak, who co-leads OpenAI's safety advisory group, wrote on X that fixing individual issues would not be enough and the company's culture must change.
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Lawmakers and staff are using AI to write speeches and news releases, sort constituent mail, prepare hearing questions and draft amendments, The Washington Post reported after interviewing more than two dozen lawmakers and staffers and obtaining internal House and Senate policies. Both chambers have approved Copilot, ChatGPT and Gemini for official work, plus Claude in the House, and the House bought 6,000 Copilot licenses last year. A staffer for Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., pasted a chatbot's answer, time stamp and all, into the public record of the annual defense authorization bill. Luna wrote that it was "Not a shocker" and that "Most staff use it." No instance surfaced of a staffer being formally disciplined by either chamber for breaking its AI rules.
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