AI regulation and standards

Sen. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat on committees overseeing tech and AI, discusses regulating the tech industry in an interview with The Verge's Decoder. He argues the Trump administration uses national security claims to justify its actions, and contrasts that with a White House event where AI executives signed a nonbinding pledge to evaluate their own AI systems.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed a three-step plan for slowing AI development, including embedding third-party evaluators in labs, coordinating across the domestic industry, and forging international agreements, potentially with government assistance. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk publicly appeared to agree with aspects of all three steps.

House Speaker Mike Johnson cancelled Thursday's votes, sending lawmakers home a day early ahead of the midterm election recess. The change means House members will not vote on Republican Thomas Massie's resolution to impeach Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

US Vice President JD Vance has rejected calls for global regulation of AI safety risks. Addressing Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, who urged Washington to coordinate AI control including with China, Vance said companies building the most advanced models should stop if they are creating a Frankenstein.

More than 20 members of Congress have called for new or stronger AI regulation after Jacob Coxon, a former OpenAI researcher, quit Anthropic and warned that AI could "kill us all by the end of the decade." Several bills are in early stages, including the Frontier Act, the AI Kill Switch Act, and the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, and Congress is mostly out of session until the midterms.

This Future of Life Institute guide explains how the EU AI Act applies to AI systems, including general-purpose AI systems such as Claude or ChatGPT, used for therapy or emotional support. Depending on the system, it may be banned in the EU, classed as high-risk, or subject to transparency obligations, and providers of certain general-purpose AI models must assess and mitigate systemic risks, including risks to public mental health. The European Commission can exercise enforcement powers from 2 August 2026.

The European Commission gained new powers under the EU AI Act to evaluate AI models before public release, restrict their EU market access, and fine providers up to 15 million euros or 3% of annual turnover, whichever is higher. The powers apply to general-purpose AI models offered in the EU regardless of where the provider is based, and they took effect on a Sunday in the staggered rollout of the 2024 law. Lawyers note that refusing an information request or blocking a model evaluation is fineable on its own.

President Donald Trump's AI executive order gave federal agencies 60 days to develop a framework, and the deadline falls on Aug. 1. The order asks AI companies to voluntarily submit their models to the government for evaluation before public release, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick tasked with setting the specifics. The framework will include a classified benchmarking process to assess models' cyber capabilities.

OpenAI published a statement on its approach to responsible AI in Europe as the EU AI Act enters its next phase. The company says it contributed to and endorsed the EU's General-Purpose AI Code of Practice and the Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content. It describes its provenance approach as combining C2PA Content Credentials with SynthID watermarks, and says it is expanding this work to audio outputs.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC he has seen the proposed framework for implementing President Donald Trump's June executive order on AI and will meet White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in Washington this week. The order asked AI companies to voluntarily provide models to the government for capability assessment before full release, and gave federal agencies 60 days, to an Aug. 1 deadline, to develop an evaluation framework.

AI companies have poured more than $20 million into a New York Democratic primary in Manhattan's 12th congressional district, a race between Alex Bores, Micah Lasher and Jack Schlossberg. Leading the Future, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Greg Brockman and Perplexity, spent $8 million opposing Bores, while Public First Action, funded with $20 million from Anthropic, has supported him with $11 million. The contest has become a proxy fight over how much government should regulate AI.

The Advisory Forum is a general advisory body to the European Commission and the AI Board, established under Article 67 of the EU AI Act to provide technical expertise. The Commission appointed 174 members on 1 June 2026, selected from more than 700 applications, drawn from industry, start-ups, SMEs, civil society and academia. Five bodies, including the Fundamental Rights Agency and ENISA, serve as permanent members.

The source is a news article describing five AI-specific risk management frameworks that organizations can use to identify AI failure modes, put controls in place, and demonstrate responsible AI use. It notes the frameworks differ in focus, covering governance, technical security controls, threat modeling, or regulatory compliance, and that they overlap in core practices. The excerpt covers ISO/IEC 42001 (published December 2023) and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework (released January 2023).

Big Tech lobbyists have pushed for federal preemption of state AI laws, a single nationwide AI rulebook passed by Congress and signed by the president. Their efforts have faced roadblocks and political backlash, and they risk losing a cooperative Congress if Democrats gain control after the midterms.

The Verge's Regulator newsletter returns after a two-week break and covers tech politics in Washington, DC. The source text is mostly a subscription pitch, a photo caption and an opening note, and it does not report the specific AI regulation developments the headline refers to.

OpenAI proposed mandatory pre-release evaluations of the most capable AI models by the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), while arguing CAISI should recommend mitigations rather than approve or block deployments. The proposal, titled "Democratic Governance of Frontier AI: A blueprint for a federal framework," came a day after a White House executive order on advanced AI innovation and security. It also calls for audits, transparency reports, incident reporting, whistleblower protections, and stronger security controls for frontier AI systems.

Hours before he was set to sign an executive order calling for a government safety review of new AI models before release, Donald Trump abruptly backed out. He said the US would not slow its AI race, citing American dominance and competition with China.

Article 50 of the EU AI Act sets transparency obligations for providers and deployers of AI systems in four situations: direct interaction with people, synthetic content generation, emotion recognition or biometric categorisation, and deepfakes or public-interest text. The obligations apply to any AI system in those situations, not only high-risk systems, and to open-source systems, from 2 August 2026.

AWS Security Blog announced a new compliance guide, ISO/IEC 42001:2023 on AWS, for organizations building an Artificial Intelligence Management System (AIMS) on AWS services. The guide maps ISO 42001:2023 clauses 4–10 and Annex A controls A.2–A.10 to AWS services and architectural capabilities, and it notes that customers remain responsible for defining their AIMS scope, implementing controls, and demonstrating conformity during certification audits.