OpenAI Asks Congress for Mandatory AI Safety Rules
OpenAI published a Global Affairs post laying out what it wants from AI regulation, written by Chris Lehane, its Chief Global Affairs Officer. The main ask is federal: OpenAI says it wants to work with Congress on mandatory, capability based national AI safety regulation, and that Congress should do this before it adjourns.
Transcript
OpenAI says Congress should pass mandatory AI safety rules before it adjourns.
OpenAI wants mandatory, capability based national safety rules for the few frontier labs building the most capable systems, not startups or small developers.
OpenAI endorsed four California bills sent to Governor Newsom, covering independent safety assessments, AI auditor standards, teen chatbot protections, and gene synthesis screening.
OpenAI says fully autonomous recursive self improvement is not happening today, and it will slow or stop development it cannot safeguard.
This is OpenAI's own position statement, not a law and not a government action. The four bills are not signed yet.
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Sources
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- OpenAI says it wants to work with Congress on mandatory, capability-based national AI safety regulation that can evolve as the technology does, and says Congress should act before it adjourns. It says a national framework should be strong but carefully targeted, applying frontier safety requirements to the handful of well-resourced laboratories developing the most capable systems, not to startups, small developers, or researchers operating nowhere near the frontier, with obligations proportionate to capabilities and risks. It says frontier safety policy should not become open-weights policy by another name, and that America needs both open and closed models. On states, OpenAI says it is formally endorsing four additional California bills that have passed the legislature and are headed to Governor Newsom: SB 813, which would establish a process for designating qualified, independent organizations capable of assessing AI risks; AB 1405, which would create registration, independence, transparency, and accountability requirements for AI auditors; SB 1119, which would require age assurance, risk assessments, independent audits, parental controls, and safeguards against harmful content for children and teens using companion chatbots; and AB 1864, which would require gene-synthesis providers and manufacturers of benchtop synthesis equipment to follow federal screening standards as a safeguard against AI-enabled biological threats. OpenAI says some of these bills it did not endorse in the past and is now supporting after reconsidering in light of a recent jump in capabilities, and that these bills are not a substitute for federal regulation. OpenAI also says it will work with other frontier labs on industry-led frontier AI standards as a voluntary effort, with or without government support, that such standards would complement rather than replace mandatory federal safeguards, and that the most urgent place to start is monitoring, including a framework it is developing for reporting consequential misalignment incidents and systematically monitoring frontier-model activity. On safety, OpenAI says that when proceeding would pose an unacceptable safety risk it will slow or stop the development or deployment of systems it cannot sufficiently safeguard, as required by its preparedness framework, and that fully autonomous recursive self-improvement, in which AI systems independently drive successive generations of increasingly capable AI, is not happening today and should not be pursued unless and until it can be done safely. It says AI is already accelerating parts of the research used to develop and align the next generation of models, citing research showing AI agents can perform some tasks that would take skilled researchers several days, and that this is not recursive self-improvement but is evidence of the direction of travel. It cites Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki's call for extreme caution. HONESTY CAVEAT: this is OpenAI's own advocacy post, written by OpenAI's Chief Global Affairs Officer, about regulation OpenAI wants; it is a company position statement, not a law and not a government action. The four California bills have passed the legislature and are headed to Governor Newsom, but they are not signed. No third-party corroboration was available at the time of writing because the YouTube research step returned zero transcripts, and the live page returns a 403 to automated fetchers, so the alert-time snapshot of the first-party post is the only source used.(OpenAI's own Global Affairs post, "The AI policy window is open. We need to act.", published on openai.com on September 9, 2026, by Chris Lehane, Chief Global Affairs Officer at OpenAI)