The AI industry’s biggest players can’t even agree on how to regulate themselves. Massachusetts has become the latest battleground in the fight over state-level AI safety rules, with OpenAI and Google lining up against provisions that Anthropic is actively championing as the strongest state AI safety proposal in the country.
The Massachusetts Senate passed an economic development bill in late July 2026 that includes AI guardrails targeting frontier developers, specifically companies generating more than $500M in AI-derived revenue or spending over $1B on research and development. The bill requires publication of safety frameworks focused on catastrophic risks, hands enforcement power to the state attorney general, and kicks off a study into independent evaluations of AI systems.
Three labs, two camps
Anthropic wants to go further. The company is pushing for independent risk assessments every four to six months, a cadence that would make Massachusetts’ rules meaningfully more demanding than anything else on the books at the state level. Anthropic has framed its preferred version as the most robust AI safety legislation in the nation.
OpenAI sees things differently. The company supports a narrower version of the legislation and has warned that aggressive state-by-state regulation risks creating a patchwork of inconsistent rules. That kind of fragmentation, OpenAI argues, could delay the release of beneficial AI models, including tools used for cybersecurity. Instead, the company favors something closer to Illinois’ approach: annual third-party audits rather than biannual independent risk evaluations.
Google has sided with OpenAI in opposing the stricter provisions.
Money talks in Massachusetts
Anthropic isn’t just lobbying with white papers. The company has made campaign contributions exceeding $120K to Massachusetts Democrats in August 2026.
On the other side of the table, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce has raised alarms that overly restrictive regulations could scare off AI investment in the state.
The bill includes $75M earmarked for AI development alongside the safety rules. The legislation is currently in bicameral negotiations as of late August 2026, meaning the final version could look substantially different from what the Senate passed.
The bigger regulatory chess match
After California’s high-profile AI safety bill was vetoed by Governor Newsom in 2024, state legislatures across the country have been drafting their own approaches.
The enforcement mechanism matters too. Giving the state attorney general authority to act on safety framework violations introduces a level of legal risk that goes beyond voluntary commitments or industry self-regulation. Companies operating in Massachusetts would need to treat their published safety frameworks as binding documents.