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, joined at rollout by Reps. Subramanyam, Franklin, Peters, and Houchin. The bill would install the first comprehensive federal framework for frontier AI. It would also, for three years, block states from writing their own.

That preemption clause is where the fight lives. As Roll Call reported, the freeze applies to state laws “specifically regulating the development” of AI models while carving out deployment and use. California’s AB 2013 training-data disclosure requirement and part of SB 942’s watermarking regime would be nullified, along with frontier safety statutes in California, New York, and Illinois. Brad Carson, president of Americans for Responsible Innovation, framed the swap plainly: the bill converts the “current state-law floor into a federal ceiling.”

The federal architecture underneath is substantial. Developers with more than $500 million in prior-year gross revenue would’ve to publish a “frontier AI framework” and report critical safety incidents. Section 112 empowers the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, codified in statute and authorized at $100 million a year through FY2029, to license independent verification organizations, borrowing structure from Illinois’s recent frontier law. Section 113 adds whistleblower protections. The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 gets extended through FY2035.

Context matters here. The draft landed two days after President Trump’s June 2 executive order establishing a voluntary 30-day pre-release review for frontier models, trimmed from 90 days in an earlier version, with mandatory licensing rejected outright. Brendan Steinhauser, CEO of the Alliance for Secure AI, praised the bipartisanship and opposed the preemption in the same breath. That’s the markup fight in miniature.

For deployers watching from underneath the $500 million line, including small and mid-size businesses running model-agnostic platforms like LemonLime, the use-side carve-out is the operative detail. Feedback goes to [email protected]. Three years is a long ceiling in an industry that rewrites itself every eighteen months.

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