Anthropic and OpenAI Split as Massachusetts Pushes Nation’s Toughest AI Safety Rules

Anthropic and OpenAI are divided on their views of a Massachusetts proposal that would establish a process in the state for evaluating the safety of artificial intelligence models, Bloomberg reported Thursday (Aug. 20).

The proposal is included in a larger economic development bill that was passed by the Massachusetts Senate last month but still requires approval by the House and the governor, according to the report.

The report described the provisions as “the nation’s most stringent state-level safeguards” for AI and said the Massachusetts proposal would go further than the AI safety laws adopted by California, New York and Illinois.

For example, while the Illinois law requires a third-party audit once a year to ensure labs are following their own safety guidelines, the Massachusetts bill would allow outside organizations to evaluate a model’s potential dangers every 120 days, based on their own guidelines. The outside organization’s findings would be made public, but the state would not be able to halt AI development, the report said.

Anthropic’s head of U.S. state and local government relations, Cesar Fernandez, said in the report that the Massachusetts proposal’s more intensive third-party evaluations are needed because “we ultimately don’t think the industry should grade its own homework.”

OpenAI’s head of U.S. state policy and partnerships, Donnie Fowler, said in the report that OpenAI prefers that states model their standards on the Illinois law because inconsistency “doesn’t mean safer. It just means confusion.”

The report said that Senate and House negotiators are ironing out the details of the economic development bill, including the AI provisions, and that the bill is likely to pass before the November election because it also includes funding for other projects.

When Anthropic donated another $20 million to AI pro-regulation group Public First Action, bringing its total contributions to the group to $40 million, the company said in a press release: “We’ve supported newly passed laws in several states that require greater transparency for AI developers. But given how fast the capabilities of the most popular models are advancing, transparency alone is insufficient.”

It was reported in August 2025 that states introduced 260 AI-related bills in the first six months of 2025 and passed 22 of them into laws.

The post Anthropic and OpenAI Split as Massachusetts Pushes Nation’s Toughest AI Safety Rules appeared first on PYMNTS.com.