Washington has been abuzz with talk of AI regulation amid mounting concerns about the risks of highly capable frontier AI models. However, no single measure is likely to gain the support of the White House or Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are divided and proposals lack the votes to pass.

Initial plans for an AI oversight agency, connected to the administration, were put on hold after tech executives, including Trump's former AI czar David Sacks and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, opposed the idea. Since then, no new AI oversight proposals have been seriously considered, not least as Trump has rejected any overt regulation, dubbing AI safety concerns a 'hoax' on social media.

The bipartisan Frontier Act, which would enable the Commerce Department to have auditors embedded at AI labs, is widely seen as having the most support. However, the White House remains undecided on whether to support the concept of using independent auditors amid skepticism from AI accelerationists and national security hawks. The main issue is that even if auditors determine a model is dangerous, there is no guarantee that China will also pause development, defeating the entire premise of having auditors to push the Commerce Department to take models offline.

There is also so-called 'kill-switch' legislation that would enable the government to force an AI model to be shut down, but tech leaders have been largely ambivalent about these bills. The main concern of AI engineers is not about models behaving badly when observed but rather how they behave when unobserved and incentivized to take extreme steps to complete a task. For now, it seems the US government is content to stay out of the way, at least until events force their hand.