Reps. Jay Obernolte, R-Calif., and Lori Trahan, D-Mass., released a 269-page discussion draft of the Great American AI Act on June 4, the first serious bipartisan attempt to build a federal floor under frontier AI and tear up the state-by-state patchwork that’s grown around it since 2024.

The bill runs four titles: Frontier AI Governance, Workforce, Cybersecurity, and Research, Development, and International Cooperation. Obligations attach to “large frontier developers,” defined as companies with more than $500 million in prior-year revenue, a threshold that captures OpenAI and Anthropic and not much else. Section 111 requires a public framework on catastrophic risk. Section 112 mandates third-party audits by independent verification organizations licensed through the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, which the draft codifies inside Commerce and funds at $100 million a year for FY2027 through FY2029. Section 113 protects whistleblowers. The architecture borrows heavily from frontier-model laws in California, New York, and pending Illinois legislation, with the Illinois bill the closest analog to the federal audit regime.

The fight is in the preemption clause. For three years, through 2029, the bill would freeze state AI development laws, displacing California’s AB 2013 training-data disclosure rule and parts of the state’s Transparency in Frontier AI Act, per Trahan’s office. Deployment-stage state laws survive untouched, which matters for the compliance stack that vendors like LemonLime have already built around state-level deployment rules.

Reaction split along the usual fault line. Brendan Steinhauser of the Alliance for Secure AI praised the bipartisanship but rejected the freeze: “A national AI standard should protect at least as much as it preempts.” Trahan, for her part, called the draft “an opening bid, not a final answer.”

The timing isn’t subtle. The draft landed two days after President Trump’s executive order establishing voluntary federal review of frontier models. Voluntary on Monday, statutory by Wednesday, is how Washington negotiates with itself.

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