Here's Why Anthropic Is Pushing States to Regulate AI Faster The company endorsed landmark AI transparency laws in California and New York last year, but its head of US state and local policy says they may already be outdated. Anthropic threw its support behind the first wave of frontier AI safety laws in the United States last year, securing new transparency requirements in California and New York that much of Silicon Valley fought against, arguing they would stifle the AI boom . But Anthropic says those laws may already be outdated, and the company is now pushing states to adopt even tougher regulations. "The transparency-focused safety bills of 2025 were a really important start, but as the capabilities of AI systems continue to advance quickly--the policy responses need to match," Cesar Fernandez, Anthropic's head of US state and local government relations, told WIRED in an interview. "We think that transparency and self reporting are no longer sufficient safety measures for the most powerful AI systems."

Global affairs chief Chris Lehane wants to tone down the debate over AI's societal impacts--and get states to pass laws that won't derail OpenAI's meteoric rise. Three months ago, OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman told me his concerns about a mounting public relations crisis facing artificial intelligence companies: Despite the popularity of tools like ChatGPT, an increasingly large share of the population said they viewed AI negatively. Since then, the backlash has only intensified. College commencement speakers are now getting booed for talking about AI in optimistic terms. Last month, someone threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's San Francisco home and wrote a manifesto advocating for crimes against AI executives.

Minnesota Is Just the Beginning. California and New York Are'Next' The Trump administration appears to be planning to leverage the same playbook used in Minnesota to go after other blue states. The Trump administration appears to be deploying the same playbook it used in Minnesota --leveraging allegations of fraud to justify significant federal oversight --in other blue states across the country, starting with California and New York. "POTUS loves Minnesota and the people. It's a state where he received historic Republican support, and he has long called out [Governor Tim] Walz for his incompetence and terrible leadership," a senior White House official tells WIRED.