Today · posts, October 18

Anthropic confirms leaked AI safety draft; text isn't final

Anthony Cimino, head of Anthropic's federal affairs team, says the leaked federal AI safety draft came from Anthropic and says Anthropic will revise its preemption wording

Concept illustration: a large white sheet on a light beige background has a black angular mark and the lettering ANTHROPIC DRAFT at the top, with grey bars above and below a brick-red block that holds four white lines. A black tag lettered STATE LAW overlaps the sheet's left edge beside the red block, and from the right a hand in a black sleeve with a white cuff holds a black pen whose tip touches the end of the lowest white line.

Why it matters: Anthropic says the leaked draft grew from Anthropic's policy proposal and is being rewritten, so the current text isn't a settled position.

The October 18 issue's Also happened section reported that policy advocate Nathan Calvin had read the leaked draft and criticized its high thresholds and the removal of state courts' shutdown power. Today Anthropic acknowledged the draft as its own.

Cimino, who describes himself as head of Anthropic's federal affairs team, said on X that the draft translates Anthropic's Advanced AI Framework into legislative language and was "shared with a small number of congressional offices that have been working on these issues" (Anthony Cimino, 2026-10-18). The Advanced AI Framework is Anthropic's policy proposal. The explainer page Cimino linked hasn't been reviewed.

Preemption means that once a federal law passes, state AI safety laws no longer apply. Anthropic's stated position on it, in Cimino's words: "Congress should only override state law on AI safety if it passes a very strong federal standard." Cimino also says the draft's risk thresholds were "pulled directly from existing standards in California law." Cimino added: "This was a draft, and we're working on updating it." (Anthony Cimino, 2026-10-18).

Not proven yet: neither the full draft nor the rewritten version has been reviewed How we checked →

Judgment update: No new call from SecondSource today. The next thing to watch is the rewritten version Cimino mentions: what the preemption section becomes, and whether the thresholds end up stricter than California law.

Answer check: On September 6 SecondSource opened a card asking whether OpenAI would, by October 18 and through an official channel, explain the incident in which an OpenAI AI agent set up a message board on a German wiki site, including when OpenAI learned of it. Missed. Fortune reports OpenAI issued only a statement on X and did not say when it learned of the incident. At the deadline, reporters and outside researchers were still piecing together when and how it was found. Card →

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Oct 19, 2026, alongside 9 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "Anthropic confirms leaked AI safety draft; text isn't final." https://secondsource.io/en/news/2026-10-19-3/. Accessed access date.