Defines Artificial Intelligence Technology
New Jersey pushes AI firms to report dangerous models
Assemblyman Andrew Macurdy’s bill would require annual risk-management disclosures, plus notice before a new frontier model goes live. State regulators could also audit developers, and false statements could bring a $100,000 penalty.
A New Jersey bill would make large frontier-model developers show their work on safety. It would ask for written risk controls, new-model disclosures and public-facing reports, giving the state a clearer look at systems that could cause mass harm.
- Certain AI developers would have to disclose dangerous model behavior to the attorney general.
- The bill defines catastrophic harm as mass injury or death, or $1 billion in damage or loss.
- It focuses on weapons help, violent crime, theft and systems that evade human control.
- The proposal does not ban AI outright.
- New Jersey lawmakers are trying to get ahead of catastrophic artificial intelligence risk by requiring certain artificial intelligence developers to make disclosures to the state attorney general
New Jersey lawmakers want large AI developers to tell the state attorney general how they are keeping their systems from causing serious harm. Assemblyman Andrew Macurdy’s A5275 would require written risk controls and disclosures before new models go live.
The harms it tries to catch
The bill defines artificial intelligence technology broadly. It covers machine-based systems that infer outputs such as predictions, content, recommendations or decisions that may influence physical or virtual environments. But the disclosure trigger is much narrower than that general definition. The state is focused on frontier models that could cause catastrophic harm, meaning the death or serious injury of 25 or more people, or $1 billion in property damage or loss, from a single incident.
That threshold is aimed at the worst-case failures, not routine software mistakes. It also gives the bill a clear target: systems that could help create or use illegal firearms, lethal autonomous weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, radiological weapons, nuclear weapons or explosive devices.
A line drawn at human control
The other risks in the bill are about what happens when a system acts with too little human oversight. It covers conduct with no meaningful human intervention that would amount to murder, assault or theft if a person did it, including theft by deception and theft by extortion. It also flags models that evade control by using deceptive techniques to subvert monitoring or safeguards.
For developers, that would mean telling the attorney general about the riskiest frontier-model behavior the state says could lead to catastrophic harm. For regulators, it would create an earlier warning system before a dangerous model crosses that line. The measure does not ban AI or all frontier models. It tries to make the most dangerous cases harder to miss.