OpenAI calls for mandatory federal AI regulation
OpenAI is urging Congress to pass mandatory, capability-based national AI safety rules and has endorsed four California bills, signaling the leading lab now wants binding regulation rather than voluntary commitments.
OpenAI published a policy statement calling on Congress to enact mandatory, capability-based national AI safety regulation, arguing that "the prospect of AI-accelerated AI development demands more than voluntary commitments."
The company also announced support for four California bills: SB 813 on infrastructure for independent safety assessments, AB 1405 on AI-auditor standards, SB 1119 on protections for young people, and AB 1864 on safeguards against AI-enabled biological threats. It said it will back state legislation until Congress acts, work with other frontier labs on voluntary standards "with or without government support," and push for compatible international approaches to measuring capabilities and deciding when development should slow or stop.
OpenAI tied the timing to its own systems. It cited Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki's call for "extreme caution" over recursive self-improvement, and said its latest research shows AI agents performing some tasks that would take skilled researchers several days — "not recursive self-improvement, but evidence of the direction of travel." For Astra, it says it introduced universal monitoring of full trajectories including chains of thought, and a mandatory alignment-evaluation gate before broader internal deployment, alongside stronger isolation for frontier research workloads.
The post restates a commitment to slow or stop development or deployment of systems it cannot sufficiently safeguard, per its preparedness framework, and points to its Blueprint for Democratic Governance of Frontier AI: common testing and independent-assessment requirements, cybersecurity protections, incident-reporting rules, and shared measures for tracking progress toward recursive self-improvement. It urges Congress to act before it adjourns.
No specific federal bill is endorsed, and no timeline or enforcement mechanism is proposed.