Lori Trahan is a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives for Massachusetts's 3rd congressional district (Source: liccardo.house.gov). In 2026 she was the Democratic co-author, with Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-California), of a bipartisan House framework for frontier AI, and in September 2026 one of four House Democrats leading a letter that asked the Speaker to keep the House in session until Congress advanced AI safeguards.
Frontier AI legislation
The Great American AI Act and the FRONTIER Act
On June 2, 2026 Trahan published an op-ed defending a proposed federal framework setting guardrails around powerful new frontier models, citing Anthropic's Mythos Preview as an example of the model class at issue. Americans for Responsible Innovation ran advertisements in her district arguing that the measure was a stalking horse for Republican efforts to preempt state AI-safety laws (Source: insideaipolicy.com). See AI Industry Lobbying — The 2025-2026 Political Offensive.
On June 4, 2026 she and Obernolte released the 269-page discussion draft of the Great American Artificial Intelligence Act, with Reps. Erin Houchin (R-Indiana) and Scott Peters (D-California) as original co-sponsors. It would require top developers to disclose frontier-model safety and security risks to third-party auditors, authorize the Center for AI Standards and Innovation with a $100 million annual budget, require licensed independent verification organizations for adequacy audits, carry $1 million civil penalties, and preempt state laws on AI development for three years while preserving state authority over deployment and use (Frontier Act / Great American AI Act (Obernolte–Trahan)). The sponsors jointly said that "policy for a technology this transformative can only be built to last if it's written by both parties" (Source: obernolte.house.gov).
Trahan described her assent to preemption as conditional: "I will preempt, but only if we're setting the strongest possible federal standard. A preemption provision in a bill with no meaningful federal standard is a moratorium, and I won't sign onto that." She called the draft's December 2029 sunset "a forcing function that prevents Congress from doing what we did with Section 230" (Source: techpolicy.press).
In July 2026 she and Obernolte introduced a 74-page successor bill, the FRONTIER Act (H.R. 9925), which tiers developers by size, requires transparency and critical-incident reporting from all tiers, requires the largest developers to retain Commerce-licensed independent verification organizations, creates a Commerce under-secretary for AI security, permits the Commerce Secretary to suspend development or deployment posing imminent catastrophic risk, and narrows preemption to state transparency, third-party-audit and incident-reporting laws (Source: obernolte.house.gov; Frontier Act / Great American AI Act (Obernolte–Trahan)). OpenAI said on September 15, 2026 that it supports the bill's independent-verification-organizations provision, the first time it had backed a specific federal mandate for outside assessors (Source: politico.com).
An account of September 17, 2026 dates the FRONTIER Act's introduction to July 23 and places it with the Energy and Commerce Committee, while the other bills split from the discussion draft went to the committees holding jurisdiction over their subjects. The same account describes Title I of the draft as preempting state laws governing how AI models are built for three years unless Congress renews it, reaching what a developer does before deployment while leaving state rules on use, privacy, consumer protection and civil rights in place. According to Trahan's office, the preemption would reach two California laws, AB 2013, which requires developers to publish summaries of their training data, and parts of SB 942, the state's AI content watermarking statute, and frontier safety laws in California, New York and Illinois would be federalized under the bill (Source: broadbandbreakfast.com). The account does not say whether the three-year preemption it describes is that of the discussion draft or survives in the introduced FRONTIER Act, whose preemption the sponsors describe as limited to state transparency, third-party-audit and incident-reporting laws.
Speaking at the Future of Life Institute's Pro-Human AI Assembly in Washington on September 15, 2026, Trahan said the bill should "just be the start," and that it would put responsibility for AI safety within the Commerce Department "out in the open where the public can see it, rather than buried inside the national security apparatus." House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had pointed to Trahan's work the previous day as an example of his party's work on AI (Source: rollcall.com).
Antitrust coordination
Trahan is one of eight original cosponsors of H.R. 9914, the House version of the Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act, introduced July 23, 2026, which would exempt from the antitrust laws certain agreements among developers to delay or limit AI development or release for security purposes (S. 5105 — Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act (bill text)).
Letter to Speaker Johnson
With Reps. Sam Liccardo (D-California), George Whitesides (D-California) and Ted Lieu (D-California), Trahan co-signed a letter drafted by Liccardo and dated September 11, 2026 urging Speaker Mike Johnson to reconvene the House immediately and advance "meaningful, bipartisan safeguards for advanced artificial intelligence" (Source: liccardo.house.gov). A version dated September 15 and released September 16, led by the same four members and signed by 107 House Democrats, asked Johnson to keep the House in session to address "the catastrophic risks posed by advanced artificial intelligence" and listed "bills mandating transparency and evaluation of frontier models, 'kill switch' requirements, and a waiver of antitrust laws" as proposals deserving action, without naming a bill (Letter from 107 House Democrats to Speaker Mike Johnson on AI safeguards (September 2026)). An account of the earlier version identified two of the proposals as the AI Kill Switch Act and the FRONTIER Act; the letter itself does not name them (Source: axios.com). See Coordinated slowdown proposals compared.
Relationships
- supports: Frontier Act / Great American AI Act (Obernolte–Trahan) — co-author of the discussion draft and the FRONTIER Act.
- supports: Collaboration on Adversarial Threats and Security Risks Act (S. 5105) — original cosponsor of H.R. 9914.
- related: Jay Obernolte — Republican co-author.
- related: Ted Lieu, Sam Liccardo, Mike Johnson, Letter from 107 House Democrats to Speaker Mike Johnson on AI safeguards (September 2026) — co-leaders of, recipient of, and text of the September 2026 letter.
- related: Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI) — ran advertisements against her framework in June 2026.
- related: Independent Verification Organizations (IVOs), AI Federalism, AI Pre-Release Vetting.