Postpone AI Public Offerings Until US Congress Acts

What does exist is self-regulation, which is tantamount today to no regulation. On September 29, six AI and chip companies signed a voluntary and nonbinding“Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities” at the White House.

This would be laughable if it weren't so potentially disastrous. A technology whose own makers describe its risks in dire terms should be governed by public institutions with defined procedures, independent monitoring, and enforceable liability, not by the self-judgment of a handful of business executives.

A rushed public offering would make the problem vastly harder to fix. Anthropic has reportedly committed at least $518 billion to computing infrastructure over the coming decade, with about 80 percent of it described as non-cancellable. With quarterly guidance to public shareholders, those commitments create a powerful incentive against any pause, even one the company's own safety researchers might recommend.

The prospectus itself reportedly describes a“continuous and overlapping cadence” of product launches as“inherent to remaining at the frontier.” Once these shares sit in the pension funds and index funds of tens of millions of American households, any proposal to slow frontier development will be fought not only by the companies but by a vast investor constituency.

The extensive risk disclosures do not solve this problem. They may or may not protect the company from lawsuits by its own shareholders, who will have been warned. They do nothing for the public, which bears the catastrophic risk without ever having been asked.

The usual reply is that if America's most safety-conscious developers slow down, less careful companies, or China, will race ahead. This is a standard collective-action problem, and such problems are solved by agreements backed by law, monitoring, and enforcement, not by everyone running faster to doom.

We are not living in Hobbes's state of nature. We have the United Nations, treaty law, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Congress. During the Cold War, adversaries negotiated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with international inspection. Frontier AI even offers a natural point of verification: the most advanced chips come from a handful of factories, and frontier training requires huge data centers.

Washington has not offered Beijing a verifiable agreement on frontier AI. In fact, after his summit with President Xi Jinping in September, President Trump rejected cooperation with China on AI, agreeing only to a channel for communicating about AI incidents.“When you're leading,” he said,“you don't open it up to each other.”

Who can act to slow the juggernaut and prevent a potential catastrophe? Under current law, the SEC can delay an offering but cannot block it on the ground that the business is dangerous.

It should nonetheless decline to accelerate the effectiveness of the registration statement until the company discloses the risks of its products, who would bear the cost of the catastrophes it describes, what insurance exists, and whether its computing contracts would allow a safety pause without penalty.

The decisive authority lies with Congress, and there is ample precedent. Congress has required regulatory approval for securities issued by railroads, by utility holding companies, and by electric utilities, for which federal or state approval is still required today. When nuclear power was opened to private industry in 1954, it was permitted only under federal license.

The outgoing Congress should hold hearings before any shares are priced and should enact a moratorium on public offerings by frontier AI developers until the next Congress acts. The new Congress, which is scheduled to convene on January 3, should within its first hundred days enact a statute making any public offering by a frontier AI developer conditional on a federal license.

The license should require independent evaluation before deployment, an enforceable authority to pause training or deployment that no take-or-pay contract can override, and insurance and compensation funds scaled to plausible harms.