The Pulse
Cruz Says Senate AI Safety Bill Won’t Get Pre-Election Vote
Senate Commerce Chair Ted Cruz says bipartisan AI safety talks have stalled, ruling out committee action before the election. Sen. Amy Klobuchar says negotiations continue and she hopes to pass safeguards by year’s end.
AI.info Team · Written with AI ·
“We don’t yet have bipartisan agreement on that bill, so at this point, any markup would have to be during a lame duck. I’m frustrated by that.”
Ted Cruz, Senate Commerce Committee chair
Cruz’s Sept. 29 assessment marks a retreat from hopes, voiced earlier this month, of moving a bipartisan AI safety bill through the Senate Commerce Committee before the midterm election. Cruz and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat working with him, told Semafor the talks have stalled and there will be no committee action before voters go to the polls. A bill could still be introduced before the election, Cruz said, but senators have not decided whether to do so.
A September markup slips away
On Sept. 16, Cruz said he would like to hold a committee markup that month if negotiators reached bipartisan agreement. Klobuchar and Sen. Maria Cantwell, the committee’s top Democrat, also said they were working on the proposal. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who was involved in the effort, offered a more cautious assessment, saying whether the bill would get a committee vote remained uncertain.
The new timetable leaves the so-called lame-duck session—the period after the election and before the next Congress begins—as the earliest window for committee action. Cruz said he wants the effort to move forward, but his remarks put a vote before the election off the table. Klobuchar said she continues to talk with Republicans and hopes to “pass strong safeguards” by the end of the year.
The bill’s design is still unsettled
The proposal’s outline has taken shape through lawmakers’ descriptions, but the text has not been publicly released. Klobuchar has described a bill focused on approvals, presenting models to government experts and alerting officials to imminent harm. Cruz has characterized the effort as legislation addressing catastrophic risks involving biological or nuclear threats.
Negotiators have also faced disagreement over how federal rules would interact with state laws. A Sept. 11 Semafor report said the draft was understood to include language that would preempt state AI safety laws. Cantwell wanted a stricter version imposing legal duties on companies to manage catastrophic risks, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Klobuchar blames Trump’s opposition
Klobuchar said President Donald Trump’s opposition to what she called “common-sense, bipartisan guardrails” has complicated negotiations. The political divide leaves the senators trying to assemble cross-party support while the White House resists AI restrictions. The talks’ stall does not establish that a bill cannot pass; it does narrow the available time for senators to agree on its scope and move it through committee.
For now, the immediate outcome is clear: no committee action before the election. Whether senators introduce a bipartisan bill before then remains undecided, while Cruz says any markup would have to wait for the lame duck.