Props to @Andres Jimenez Zorrilla 🔸 for dealing with the razzing. Enduring people’s incredulous reactions is an important part of the work and you did a fantastic job being patient and earnest.

Really crack reporting, Garrison! You’re doing the lord’s work.

There’s nothing special going on here— higher levels of government prevail if laws at two different levels conflict. The federal government has the right to regulate AI in a way that preempts state level governance: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/preemption

We are asking people to tell their Senators not to allow this provision to pass because it means choking out the best hope for AI regulation given Congress’s lack of interest/heavy AI industry lobbying. It’s not offering any federal level regulation— just making it so the states can’t implement any of their own.

There’s nothing special going on here— higher levels of government prevail if laws at two different levels conflict. The federal government has the right to regulate AI in a way that preempts state level governance: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/preemption

We are asking people to tell their Senators not to allow this provision to pass because it means choking out the best hope for AI regulation given Congress’s lack of interest/heavy AI industry lobbying. It’s not offering any federal level regulation— just making it so the states can’t implement any of their own.

That has nothing to do with this? The federal government has a right to pass laws at the federal level to preempt state levels laws. There’s a procedural problem with this one (violates Byrd Rule) but we are asking people to tell their Senators they oppose it because of the content.

What is your point? In this case Congress is showing no interest in AI regulation and is heavily lobbied by AI labs and related defense contractors, but state legislatures can act as a check on this, as the federalist system intended.

1. Who framed it in terms of individual rights?
2. In animal welfare, federal preemption is usually about powerful lobbies (animal ag, pesticides) wanting control and having more influence at the federal level. That’s the closer analogy in this case— AI company lobbies want to have a bottleneck they control. If Congress passes federal AI regulation, it can always preempt state-level regulation. What that provision says is states can’t regulate AI and there’s no federal proposal for doing so instead.

You can share this information in tweet form: https://x.com/pauseaius/status/1922828892886401431

(FYI I'm the ED of PauseAI US and we have our own website pauseai-us.org)

1. It is on every actor morally to do the right thing by not advancing dangerous capabilities separate from whether everyone else does it, even though everyone pausing and then agreeing to safe development standards is the ideal solution. That's what that language refers to. I'm very careful about taking positions as an org, but, personally, I also think unilateral pauses would make the world safer compared to no pauses by slowing worldwide development. In particular, if the US were to pause capabilities development, our competitors wouldn't have our frontier research to follow/imitate, and it would take other countries longer to generate those insights themselves.

2. "PauseAI NOW" is not just the simplest and best message to coordinate around, it's also an assertion that we are ALREADY in too much danger. You pause FIRST, then sort out the technical details. 

Feels like your true objection here is that frontier AI development just isn't that dangerous? Otherwise I don't know how you could be more concerned about the few piddling "inaccuracies and misleading statements that I won't fully enumerate" than nobody doing CAIP's work to get the beginnings of safeguards in place.