The AI industry’s biggest players can’t even agree on how to regulate themselves. Massachusetts has become the latest battleground in the fight over state-level AI safety rules, with OpenAI and Google lining up against provisions that Anthropic is actively championing as the strongest state AI safety proposal in the country.
The Massachusetts Senate passed an economic development bill in late July 2026 that includes AI guardrails targeting frontier developers, specifically companies generating more than $500M in AI-derived revenue or spending over $1B on research and development. The bill requires publication of safety frameworks focused on catastrophic risks, hands enforcement power to the state attorney general, and kicks off a study into independent evaluations of AI systems.
Three labs, two camps
Anthropic wants to go further. The company is pushing for independent risk assessments every four to six months, a cadence that would make Massachusetts’ rules meaningfully more demanding than anything else on the books at the state level. Anthropic has framed its preferred version as the most robust AI safety legislation in the nation.
OpenAI sees things differently. The company supports a narrower version of the legislation and has warned that aggressive state-by-state regulation risks creating a patchwork of inconsistent rules. That kind of fragmentation, OpenAI argues, could delay the release of beneficial AI models, including tools used for cybersecurity. Instead, the company favors something closer to Illinois’ approach: annual third-party audits rather than biannual independent risk evaluations.
