Overview
The Great American AI Act (GAAIA) is a bipartisan 269-page House discussion draft released June 4, 2026 by Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-CA) and Lori Trahan (D-MA). Would establish comprehensive federal AI governance — not yet formally introduced.
Timeline
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2026-07-29/30: Broader US AI control discourse — Trump considering controls after OpenAI incidents; related to existing legislative/EO track (2026-07-30-trump-considering-ai-controls)
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2026-06-04: Discussion draft released; public feedback via [email protected]
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2026-06-02: White House AI executive order (same policy week context)
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Pre-legislation stakeholder input phase
Key Provisions
- CAISI codification: $100M/year FY2027–2029; voluntary standards, frontier evaluations
- Frontier reporting: Developers with $500M+ revenue publish risk frameworks; catastrophic risk thresholds
- IVO audits: Independent Verification Organizations certified by caisi
- State preemption: 3-year suspension of state laws regulating AI model development (contested)
- CISA OSS grants: Security funding for critical open-source maintainers
- NAIRR formalization: National AI Research Resource
Political Context
- Bipartisan sponsors: Obernolte, Trahan, Subramanyam, Franklin, Peters, Houchin
- Opposition: House Democratic Commission on AI; civil-society groups on preemption
- Preempts California AB 2013, portions of SB 942
Related Topics
- agentic-ai-regulation
- ai-governance
- frontier-models
- caisi
- regulatory-compliance
- us-china-ai-competition
- jay-obernolte
- lori-trahan