Anthropic Opposes the Extreme AI Liability Bill That OpenAI Backed
Anthropic and OpenAI are clashing over a proposed Illinois law that would let AI labs largely off the hook for mass deaths and financial disasters.
Anthropic has come out against a proposed Illinois law backed by OpenAI that would shield AI labs from liability if their systems are used to cause large-scale harm, like mass casualties or more than $1 billion in property damage.
The fight over the state bill, SB 3444, is drawing new battlelines between Anthropic and OpenAI over how AI technologies should be regulated . While AI policy experts say that the legislation only has a remote chance of becoming law, it has nonetheless exposed political divisions between two leading US AI labs that could become increasingly important as the rival companies ramp up their lobbying activity across the country.
Behind the scenes, Anthropic has been lobbying state senator Bill Cunningham, SB 3444’s sponsor, and other Illinois lawmakers to either make major changes to the bill or kill it as it stands, according to people familiar with the matter. In an email to WIRED, an Anthropic spokesperson confirmed the company’s opposition to SB 3444, and said it has held promising conversations with Cunningham about using the bill as a starting point for future AI legislation.
“We are opposed to this bill. Good transparency legislation needs to ensure public safety and accountability for the companies developing this powerful technology, not provide a get-out-of-jail-free card against all liability,” Cesar Fernandez, Anthropic’s head of US state and local government relations, said in a statement. “We know that Senator Cunningham cares deeply about AI safety and we look forward to working with him on changes that would instead pair transparency with real accountability for mitigating the most serious harms frontier AI systems could cause."
Representatives for Cunningham did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Illinois governor JB Pritzker sent the following statement: “While the Governor’s Office will monitor and review the many AI bills moving through the General Assembly, governor Pritzker does not believe big tech companies should ever be given a full shield that evades responsibilities they should have to protect the public interest”
The crux of OpenAI and Anthropic’s disagreement over SB 3444 comes down to who should be liable in the event of an AI-enabled disaster—a nightmare potential scenario that US lawmakers have only recently begun to confront. If SB 3444 were passed, an AI lab would not be responsible if a bad actor used their AI model to, for example, create a bioweapon that kills hundreds of people, so long as the lab drafted its own safety framework and published it on its website.
