On July 23rd, the Frontier Risk Oversight, National Transparency, Independent Evaluation, and Reporting Act[1] or FRONTIER Act[2] was introduced by Jay Obernolte (R-CA) and Lori Trahan (D-MA) in the House. This bill, if passed, would be the federal framework on frontier AI, covering frontier developer safety frameworks, transparency reports upon new model releases, and incident reporting. It also would introduce a licensing regime for third party verification organizations, give the Secretary of Commerce authority to issue developers emergency orders to suspend or restrict frontier developers’ AI models, including internally, and would preempt states from passing new laws on developers with respect to frontier AI transparency, third-party auditing, and incident reporting.
While there are other issues[3] I have with it that’ll be saved for a separate post, what’s particularly notable to me is how much it relies on a new position created by the bill, the Under Secretary of Commerce for AI Security, to handle the implementation. This office is created by a single line in the Definitions section.
§2(21) UNDER SECRETARY.—The term “Under Secretary” means the Under Secretary of Commerce for AI Security, who shall be appointed by the Secretary.
The Under Secretary is required to:
Establish regulations for the minimum requirements of Frontier AI frameworks
Establish regulations for IVO (Independent Verification Organization) licensing and oversight, including:
Conflict-of-interest and funding-transparency requirements
Application procedures
Minimum requirements for IVO assessments
Provisions on circumstances mandating corrective action or loss of license
Rules for submission and processing of assessment reports
Define criteria for what constitutes a “substantial modification” to a model and a “material modification” to a framework.[4]
Review and change the Act’s coverage thresholds[5]
Establish confidential mechanisms for frontier developers to submit safety incident reports and catastrophic risk reports, review all of these reports
Oversee the licensing of IVOs, actually grant the licenses
Prescribe disclosure statements required for large frontier developers, charge and collect fees to offset these expenses
Consult with the Secretary of Commerce as part of the Secretary’s power to issue an emergency order suspending/restricting a developer’s training, deployment, or internal use of a model.
All of the duties to establish regulations or mechanisms are due within 180 days of the Act being passed. There’s also a significant number of discretionary duties, and the responsibility of receiving the frameworks, transparency reports, disclosure statements, audit reports, and IVO assessment reports. Additionally, in situations where the developers are allowed to redact their public frameworks or transparency reports, the Under Secretary is who receives the unredacted versions. Whoever is appointed to be the Under Secretary would be one of the most important figures in the world for frontier AI regulation.
As currently written, this Under Secretary is just appointed by the Secretary of Commerce (currently Howard Lutnick) without any particular process or confirmation required. At first glance this seems quite strange, all other Under Secretaries of Commerce are appointed by the President and then confirmed by the Senate.
This discrepancy seems to be a naming quirk, though. In the previous draft (GAAIA)[6], the responsibilities of this new Under Secretary broadly belonged to a Secretary-appointed CAISI director, with CAISI in this draft becoming more clearly established by legislative fiat and officially placed within the department of Commerce. In the new FRONTIER Act, CAISI is not mentioned once, and this new Under Secretary position is put in control of nearly all the Act’s responsibilities.
This comes as sort of a pattern of CAISI being sidelined, under-resourced and under-talented, especially with the very recent departures of Chris Fall and Paul Christiano. I don’t expect CAISI to be a particularly functional agency in the near future, although I would be surprised if making a new office within Commerce is an improvement.
I especially wouldn’t expect it to be an improvement when the GAAIA draft authorized $100 million in appropriations per year from FY2027-2029, special hiring authority for technical experts to set their pay above the GS scale, a dedicated establishment section, and wider fee authority. Meanwhile, the FRONTIER Act only has the above definition establishing the Under Secretary office. There’s no establishment section, no appropriations authorization, no hiring authority, and extremely limited fee authority.
Starting a new office instead of more closely using the existing CAISI will make it only more difficult to implement the necessary regulations by the 180-day deadline. It will take time to identify, vet, and appoint the new Under Secretary, and it will take time for them to set up the new office and consult with the necessary people to write these regulations.
Now, the bill is still newly introduced, there are some obvious revisions they have yet to make[7], so there are ways they could flesh out this Under Secretary office that would make me more excited about it. They will have to do something to establish and fund the office, but judging from the other changes from GAAIA to FRONTIER, I don’t expect it to have the same resources as CAISI would have had under GAAIA. Should it pass in anything like its current state, I expect this bill would create an unprepared, underpowered office, and I don’t trust that the person in charge would be particularly capable.
A “substantial modification” to a model prompts a new transparency report, a “material modification” to a framework requires the developer to publicly justify the modification.
Currently the Act only allows the Under Secretary to raise the coverage thresholds (from a 10^26 FLOP cutoff that defines a frontier model), not to lower them.
The FRONTIER Act barely creates its implementing office
On July 23rd, the Frontier Risk Oversight, National Transparency, Independent Evaluation, and Reporting Act[1] or FRONTIER Act[2] was introduced by Jay Obernolte (R-CA) and Lori Trahan (D-MA) in the House. This bill, if passed, would be the federal framework on frontier AI, covering frontier developer safety frameworks, transparency reports upon new model releases, and incident reporting. It also would introduce a licensing regime for third party verification organizations, give the Secretary of Commerce authority to issue developers emergency orders to suspend or restrict frontier developers’ AI models, including internally, and would preempt states from passing new laws on developers with respect to frontier AI transparency, third-party auditing, and incident reporting.
While there are other issues[3] I have with it that’ll be saved for a separate post, what’s particularly notable to me is how much it relies on a new position created by the bill, the Under Secretary of Commerce for AI Security, to handle the implementation. This office is created by a single line in the Definitions section.
The Under Secretary is required to:
Establish regulations for the minimum requirements of Frontier AI frameworks
Establish regulations for IVO (Independent Verification Organization) licensing and oversight, including:
Conflict-of-interest and funding-transparency requirements
Application procedures
Minimum requirements for IVO assessments
Provisions on circumstances mandating corrective action or loss of license
Rules for submission and processing of assessment reports
Define criteria for what constitutes a “substantial modification” to a model and a “material modification” to a framework.[4]
Review and change the Act’s coverage thresholds[5]
Establish confidential mechanisms for frontier developers to submit safety incident reports and catastrophic risk reports, review all of these reports
Oversee the licensing of IVOs, actually grant the licenses
Prescribe disclosure statements required for large frontier developers, charge and collect fees to offset these expenses
Consult with the Secretary of Commerce as part of the Secretary’s power to issue an emergency order suspending/restricting a developer’s training, deployment, or internal use of a model.
All of the duties to establish regulations or mechanisms are due within 180 days of the Act being passed. There’s also a significant number of discretionary duties, and the responsibility of receiving the frameworks, transparency reports, disclosure statements, audit reports, and IVO assessment reports. Additionally, in situations where the developers are allowed to redact their public frameworks or transparency reports, the Under Secretary is who receives the unredacted versions. Whoever is appointed to be the Under Secretary would be one of the most important figures in the world for frontier AI regulation.
As currently written, this Under Secretary is just appointed by the Secretary of Commerce (currently Howard Lutnick) without any particular process or confirmation required. At first glance this seems quite strange, all other Under Secretaries of Commerce are appointed by the President and then confirmed by the Senate.
This discrepancy seems to be a naming quirk, though. In the previous draft (GAAIA)[6], the responsibilities of this new Under Secretary broadly belonged to a Secretary-appointed CAISI director, with CAISI in this draft becoming more clearly established by legislative fiat and officially placed within the department of Commerce. In the new FRONTIER Act, CAISI is not mentioned once, and this new Under Secretary position is put in control of nearly all the Act’s responsibilities.
This comes as sort of a pattern of CAISI being sidelined, under-resourced and under-talented, especially with the very recent departures of Chris Fall and Paul Christiano. I don’t expect CAISI to be a particularly functional agency in the near future, although I would be surprised if making a new office within Commerce is an improvement.
I especially wouldn’t expect it to be an improvement when the GAAIA draft authorized $100 million in appropriations per year from FY2027-2029, special hiring authority for technical experts to set their pay above the GS scale, a dedicated establishment section, and wider fee authority. Meanwhile, the FRONTIER Act only has the above definition establishing the Under Secretary office. There’s no establishment section, no appropriations authorization, no hiring authority, and extremely limited fee authority.
Starting a new office instead of more closely using the existing CAISI will make it only more difficult to implement the necessary regulations by the 180-day deadline. It will take time to identify, vet, and appoint the new Under Secretary, and it will take time for them to set up the new office and consult with the necessary people to write these regulations.
Now, the bill is still newly introduced, there are some obvious revisions they have yet to make[7], so there are ways they could flesh out this Under Secretary office that would make me more excited about it. They will have to do something to establish and fund the office, but judging from the other changes from GAAIA to FRONTIER, I don’t expect it to have the same resources as CAISI would have had under GAAIA. Should it pass in anything like its current state, I expect this bill would create an unprepared, underpowered office, and I don’t trust that the person in charge would be particularly capable.
Summary available here.
I do really appreciate this acronym.
Some are mentioned in this post, although not all.
A “substantial modification” to a model prompts a new transparency report, a “material modification” to a framework requires the developer to publicly justify the modification.
Currently the Act only allows the Under Secretary to raise the coverage thresholds (from a 10^26 FLOP cutoff that defines a frontier model), not to lower them.
Summary available here.
Some cross-references in the Act are broken and §3(c)(2)(B) (ii) has a dangling “and” with no clause iii.