Anthropic is encouraging individual U.S. states to enact increasingly stringent AI safety laws rather than converge on a single uniform standard, according to the company’s head of state relations, who said Anthropic wants legislation that meaningfully raises the bar on safety. This diverges from OpenAI’s strategy of pushing a streamlined national framework, which critics describe as a form of reverse federalism meant to get states to replicate a common baseline. Anthropic has backed bills including California’s SB 53, New York’s RAISE Act and Illinois’s SB 315, and opposes federal preemption unless any national law is at least as strong as the state measures it would replace.
