Cybersecurity Policy Report, Concern Over AI Security Reflected in Two New Senate Bills, (Sep 28, 2026)
Members of the U.S. Senate are continuing to offer legislation to address AI security, with one bipartisan bill introduced late last week and a second that will be introduced soon.
Sens. Chris Coons (D., Del.), Katie Britt (R., Ala.), Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii), and James Lankford (R., Okla.) introduced the AI Systems Transparency Act (ASTA) (S.B. 5471, 119th Cong. (2026)), which would empower the Federal Trade Commission to develop requirements for AI developers to submit transparency reports about their advanced AI models.
The developers’ reports would have to, among other things, describe “safeguards that the AI company has used to address child safety, mental health, user privacy, cybersecurity, CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear) risk, and loss-of-control risk,” according to a summary of the legislation.
“Recent reports of security incidents with AI models make transparency and oversight all the more urgent. Our bill requires disclosures that help both consumers and evaluators understand both the capabilities of and risks posed by these models and what companies are doing to keep people safe,” Sen. Schatz said in a news release.
A second bill, the Artificial Intelligence Risk Management and Security Act, is planned for introduction by Sens. Schatz, Andy Kim (D., N.J.), and Mark Warner (D., Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It would establish a multiagency AI Safety Board led by the Commerce Department that would be empowered to require AI developers to withhold new frontier models from public release until the board completes a 45-day security assessment.
Under the bill, AI developers would have to report serious safety and security incidents within 30 days or 72 hours “when an incident poses an imminent threat to national security, critical infrastructure, or public safety,” the senators said in a news release.
“The companies building the most powerful AI systems in the world are sounding the alarm: the step-change increase in AI models’ capacity for cyber-offense, combined with clear failures to securely host and deploy these capabilities, could pose serious risks to our national security, our critical infrastructure, and the systems Americans rely on every day,” Sen. Warner said.
“I remain enormously optimistic about the potential of AI, but optimism cannot be an excuse for inaction, nor can we normalize these kinds of concerning incidents,” he said.
“If a model is capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in a bank, a water system, or our electric grid, we ought to know that before it is released to the public—not after something goes catastrophically wrong,” Sen. Warner added. “This legislation establishes basic, enforceable rules of the road to make sure the most powerful models are tested, secured, and responsibly deployed.”
News: FederalLegislation DataSecurity AINews