Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) released a 269-page discussion draft of the Great American Artificial Intelligence Act on June 4, the first comprehensive bipartisan House framework on AI and the clearest sign yet that Washington intends to take the state-built playbook national while neutralizing the states that built it.

The mechanism is a three-year preemption sunset that would freeze state AI development laws, leaving deployment and use rules alone. According to Trahan’s office, that wipes out California’s AB 2013 training-data disclosure regime and voids part of the state’s AI Transparency Act. It’s a familiar bargain: states do the legislative R&D, Congress harvests the consensus and federalizes it.

What replaces them looks recognizably Sacramento-shaped. Large frontier developers, defined as those above $500 million in prior-year gross revenue, would publish safety frameworks, report incidents to CAISI (the rebranded Biden-era AI Safety Institute), and submit to semi-annual third-party audits by state-licensed Independent Verification Organizations. CAISI itself gets codified in statute at $100 million per year through FY27-29. Penalties run up to $1 million per violation, per day, dwarfing the $1 million-to-$3 million total caps in existing state laws.

The draft also extends the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 through FY35, raises fraud penalties, and orders a study on federal “jawboning” of AI platforms. It arrived days after President Trump’s executive order on voluntary 30-day frontier model reviews, a much lighter-touch instrument the bill quietly supersedes.

Pushback is already structured. Americans for Responsible Innovation began Massachusetts ad buys this week pressing Trahan to drop the preemption, and Brendan Steinhauser of the Alliance for Secure AI told Roll Call the draft falls short: “A national AI standard should protect at least as much as it preempts.” Co-sponsors include Reps. Scott Franklin, Suhas Subramanyam, Erin Houchin, and Scott Peters. Neither lead sits atop Energy and Commerce, which means the bill’s fate runs through chairs who haven’t yet shown their hand.

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