Every general-purpose technology that reshaped American life eventually acquired an institutional referee — railroads the ICC, securities the SEC, aviation the FAA, pharmaceuticals the FDA. Artificial intelligence has reached that moment.
The United States currently governs its most consequential technology through a patchwork of state statutes, executive orders, consent decrees, and voluntary commitments. We propose that Congress do for artificial intelligence what it did for securities markets in 1934: create an expert, bipartisan, independent commission — the Artificial Intelligence Oversight Commission (AIOC) — through the American Artificial Intelligence Leadership and Accountability Act.
The framework is disclosure-based, not licensing-based. It touches roughly a dozen frontier developers and statutorily exempts everyone else. This page summarizes the proposal; the full section-by-section architecture is available in the position paper.
A three-minute explanation of the problem, the precedent, and the proposed Commission.
In January 2026, Character.AI and Google settled wrongful-death and injury suits brought by families in four states, including the family of a 14-year-old. Courts are setting AI policy by verdict because no regulator is positioned to set it by rule.
Forty states enacted AI legislation in 2025, and more than 1,500 AI bills had been introduced by March 2026. Four states — California, Colorado, New York, and Texas — now run materially divergent frontier-model regimes, creating uneven public protection and real burdens on interstate commerce.
The Senate stripped a ten-year state-AI moratorium from the 2025 reconciliation bill by a vote of 99–1, and a second preemption attempt failed in the FY2026 defense authorization. The message was not that Congress opposes national uniformity; it is that uniformity must be earned with a substantive federal framework.
The June 2026 executive order created a voluntary framework under which developers may grant the government limited pre-release access to frontier models — the executive branch asking as a favor what a statute should establish as an obligation. Industry itself has publicly proposed supervised self-regulation.
In January 2026, Character.AI and Google settled wrongful-death and injury suits brought by families in four states. Litigation is a slow, expensive, and arbitrary substitute for oversight — and it only ever arrives after the harm.
Photograph in the public domain.After 1929, Congress did not wait for securities markets to settle, and it did not start approving investment products. It built a disclosure regime — truth-telling, verified by an expert commission — and American capital markets became the deepest and most trusted in the world. The proposed framework maps that machinery onto AI.
Public companies register and are known to the regulator → covered AI developers register with the Commission (Title II).
Standardized annual disclosure of material facts → standardized annual disclosure of capabilities, evaluation results, and safety practices (Title II).
Pre-offering disclosure that becomes effective unless the agency acts → a pre-deployment Frontier Model Safety Case, effective after 90 days unless the Commission issues a deficiency notice by recorded vote (Title III).
Prompt disclosure of material events → critical safety incidents reported within 72 hours, with a good-faith safe harbor (Title IV).
Independent audit of issuer statements → accredited third-party audits of frontier safety claims (Title V).
Inspections, subpoenas, civil penalties → examination authority over registered developers, cease-and-desist power, and tiered civil penalties (Title V).
Dodd-Frank awards of 10–30% of large sanctions → an identical structure for AI safety whistleblowers, overriding contractual nondisclosure for safety reporting (Title V).
The tier structure is the framework's load-bearing wall. The floor is set high enough that the overwhelming majority of developers, startups, researchers, and open-source projects face no obligations at all.
No registration, no disclosure, no fees — an express statutory exemption rather than regulatory grace.
One-time registration and a standardized annual disclosure report covering capabilities, evaluation results, safety and security practices, and aggregate compute, with penalties for material misstatement.
All Tier 1 duties, plus a pre-deployment Frontier Model Safety Case, 72-hour incident reporting, periodic third-party audit and Commission examination, and security and insider-risk program requirements.
Thresholds are recalibrated every two years by rule, on the record, and may move in either direction — algorithmic-efficiency gains are an explicit statutory factor, so the statute does not fossilize 2026 compute economics.
There is no federal merit approval of AI products and no permission slip required to innovate. Deployment is the default; the Commission bears the burden, on the record, on a clock, and under judicial review.
An express content-neutrality provision bars the Commission from regulating the viewpoint, opinion, or lawful expressive content of model outputs. Disclosure reaches safety-relevant facts — capabilities, incidents, safeguards — not speech.
The Commission is lean and majority fee-funded, with staffing measured in the hundreds. The regulatory titles sunset seven years after enactment absent reauthorization, with comprehensive GAO review at year five.
The framework also writes innovation protections into the statute itself: a regulatory sandbox, small-entity exemptions with mandatory impact certification for every major rule, research safe harbors for good-faith red-teaming, and capability-based treatment of open-weight models that never penalizes open release as such.
A durable AI statute must give each governing coalition what it most needs while denying neither its non-negotiables. The framework is engineered around that exchange.
The position paper sets out the complete section-by-section architecture, the anticipated objections and responses, and an implementation timeline — drafted as a framework for legislative counsel.