Anthropic's draft federal AI regulation raises questions in the safety community, with the 50-casualty threshold becoming the focus of controversy

A 37-page federal AI safety legislative draft (the AEGIS Act) that Anthropic privately pitched to the U.S. Congress, after being disclosed by Politico and Reuters, sparked controversy in safety circles; the focus is that for the government to halt a dangerous model, it must be shown that the model could cause 50 or more deaths or serious injuries, or more than $1 billion in losses, and a temporary ban may last at most 45 days. Encode chief strategy officer Nathan Calvin listed nine arguments questioning whether Anthropic has departed from its safety commitments, including signing a computing agreement exceeding $500 billion and updating the third edition of its Responsible Scaling Policy, which he believes weakens hard constraints. On October 21, Dario wrote a nearly 2,000-word response on X, acknowledging that three matters, including the draft, were handled improperly but denying any departure from safety commitments, and for the first time disclosed that concerns about cyberattack misuse had led him to delay broad release of a Mythos-class model by about 4 months; this timing still lacks independent quantitative evidence. Anthropic said it will revise the draft's wording, but has not yet released a revised version and has not committed to lowering the 50-person threshold.