26 attorneys general demand federal AI safety rules from Congress
State attorneys general are done waiting for Congress to act on its own — and Microsoft has quietly retired the label it invented to sell AI laptops. Three stories for you this afternoon.
26 attorneys general from 24 states have written to Congressional leaders demanding federal AI safety rules. The letter, sent Wednesday to Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, asks for four concrete things: independent safety testing of frontier models instead of uniform federal benchmarks, government-led incident investigations with public reporting, internal safety staff empowered to halt deployments, and international coordination on pacing — all while preserving states' own enforcement power, meaning no preemption of existing state law. It also carries a sharp line: when autonomous agents are directed at harmful activity, "they violate criminal law." New York's Letitia James led the coalition, with Oregon's Dan Rayfield among the signatories; the states span both parties, from California and Massachusetts to Oklahoma and North Carolina.
The timing is the story. Congress is already weighing a duty-of-care law that could make labs responsible for unsafe models — as we covered in Senate weighs a duty-of-care law that could block unsafe AI models — and yesterday's letter is the states putting a marker down: they want federal floors, not federal ceilings that erase what California, Colorado, and New York have already built. That no-preemption demand is the real fight. Washington has a long habit of settling AI federalism by preempting the states, and 26 attorneys general saying "set standards, don't disarm us" is the clearest signal yet that the states will fight it. What to watch: whether Johnson — who has said AI safety is the companies' job, not Congress's — acknowledges the letter at all.
Microsoft has stopped calling its new Surface laptops "Copilot+ PCs" — even though they qualify. The Surface Pro 12-inch and Surface Laptop 13-inch, both shipping October 13 with Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Plus chips and an 80 TOPS neural processor, meet every requirement of the Copilot+ bar (16GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, a 40+ TOPS NPU). Surface corporate vice president Brett Ostrum confirmed the branding decision outright: "They do meet all the requirements of our previous bar for what Copilot+ devices are." The Copilot+ landing page now redirects to a generic "performance PCs" page.
The label did its job and then wore out its welcome. It sold the idea of the AI PC during a post-COVID sales lull — Copilot+ machines took 15% of US premium laptop sales in the 2024 holiday season, by Satya Nadella's count — but the Recall privacy backlash tarnished it, Dell already killed its AI PC branding, and IDC's Jitesh Ubrani says interest has been "wavering for a while" now that cloud models are everywhere and on-device use cases stay thin. Expect Nvidia's incoming RTX Spark — including a Surface Laptop Ultra — to get the marketing budget instead.
Another DeepMind engineer is leaving — and this one built the chips that make AI cheaper. Robert O'Callahan, a technical expert at Google DeepMind in Auckland who worked on chip design tools that cut the cost and latency of AI, wrote Wednesday that "aiming for ASI in the near future is inherently irresponsible" and that AI's "current rate of change is far too high." He rates the risk from superintelligent AI "real but uncertain" but says he'd bet the harms outweigh the benefits, and he wants to do "unambiguously pro-human" work instead. He is explicit that his exit is not part of the viral wave of safety resignations — we covered DeepMind's first high-profile departure earlier this month in Google DeepMind safety researcher quits, says AI 'could kill us all'. O'Callahan's departure matters for a different reason: it's a builder, not a safety researcher, concluding that the infrastructure work itself can no longer be justified.
Should Congress write federal AI safety rules the states can't weaken — or is a messy patchwork better than nothing? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: KPTV · WKOW · Politico · Windows Central · Ars Technica · Digit.in · Robert O'Callahan · The Decoder
