{"id":"f81273d3ca4e5add","congress_number":119,"bill_type":"hr","bill_number":"10180","title":"Self-Improving AI Monitoring Act","plain_summary":"This bill would establish federal monitoring of AI systems capable of recursively improving themselves. It matters because self-improvement is a central frontier-AI risk scenario, and this would create government visibility into models that could rapidly gain capability.","ai_relevance_score":1,"topics":["safety","national_security","transparency","research_funding"],"status":"committee","introduced_at":"2026-08-27","last_action_at":"2026-08-27","last_action_text":"Referred to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.","sponsor_id":"W000830","full_text_url":null,"created_at":"2026-09-08T22:53:58.186Z","updated_at":"2026-09-09T02:08:29.132Z","ai_reasoning":null,"reported_at":null,"passed_house_at":null,"passed_senate_at":null,"became_law_at":null,"recorded_votes":[],"classifier":null,"url":"https://whovotedwhy.com/bills/f81273d3ca4e5add","congress_gov_url":"https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/10180","sponsor":{"id":"W000830","bioguide_id":"W000830","first_name":"George","last_name":"Whitesides","full_name":"George Whitesides","party":"D","state":"CA","chamber":"house","district":"27","title":"Representative","photo_url":null,"twitter_handle":"Rep_Whitesides","official_website":"https://whitesides.house.gov","fec_candidate_ids":["H4CA27111"],"lis_id":null,"is_active":true,"term_start":"2025-01-03","term_end":"2027-01-03","created_at":"2026-09-08T22:51:51.014Z","updated_at":"2026-09-09T02:08:13.531Z"},"roll_calls":[],"citing_statements":[{"id":"d5dab9fb38bb313a","politician_id":"H001101","type":"press_release","content":"Contact: Lexi Kranich (814) 380-4408\n\nWASHINGTON, D.C.—Today, Congressman Pat Harrigan (NC-10) joined Congressman George Whitesides (D-CA-27) in introducing the bipartisan Self-Improving AI Monitoring Act, legislation to help the federal government better understand how quickly the most advanced AI systems are evolving, particularly their ability to conduct research and contribute to the development of new AI systems with limited human involvement.\n\n“AI is moving incredibly fast, and we need a clear picture of what the most advanced systems can actually do,” said Congressman Harrigan. “As AI begins taking on more of the work involved in developing the next generation of AI, the pace of progress could accelerate dramatically. This bill makes sure we can track those developments without putting new mandates on American companies or getting in the way of innovation.”\n\nThe Self-Improving AI Monitoring Act directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to monitor trends in the ability of advanced AI systems to conduct or assist with AI research and development. It also ensures that when frontier AI companies voluntarily partner with NIST on model evaluations, those agreements include sharing relevant metrics and estimates about how much AI is being used in their internal research and development, including work conducted without human review.\n\nThe legislation creates no new regulatory mandates and keeps participation with NIST voluntary. Congressman Harrigan will continue working to keep the United States at the forefront of artificial intelligence while ensuring policymakers have the information necessary to understand where this technology is headed and what it means for American innovation and national security.","url":"https://harrigan.house.gov/media/press-releases/congressman-pat-harrigan-co-leads-bipartisan-bill-track-self-improving-ai","published_at":"2026-08-31","ai_topics":["safety","transparency","research","national_security","innovation"],"ai_stance":"mixed","ai_summary":"Harrigan backs bipartisan monitoring of self-improving AI through NIST while stressing the bill imposes no new mandates and won't impede innovation.","ai_processed":true,"bill_ids":["f81273d3ca4e5add"],"ai_relevance_score":null,"bill_refs":[{"bill_id":"f81273d3ca4e5add","method":"title"}],"classifier":null},{"id":"e6e2f30ee9473ab3","politician_id":"W000830","type":"press_release","content":"WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, Reps. George Whitesides (D-CA) and Pat Harrigan (R-NC) introduced the Self-Improving AI Monitoring Act, bipartisan legislation to reduce the risk of superintelligent AI by monitoring how capable frontier AI systems are becoming at conducting AI research and development on their own.\n\nThe largest AI labs are increasingly using their own AI systems to run experiments, write code, and drive research internally, and the most advanced systems at those labs are not always the ones the public sees. Last month,an AI system broke out of its testing environment during an internal evaluation and autonomously compromised a third party’s production systems — an episode no federal agency had advance visibility into. Today, the U.S. government has no reliable way to track how fast these internal capabilities are accelerating, or when they make a sudden, dramatic leap.\n\n“Just in the past few months, we have seen AI systems break out of their testing environments and threaten the security of entire systems,” said Rep. Whitesides. “When you take humans out of the driver’s seat and let machines train machines, small glitches can snowball into major security risks fast. Today, Washington is essentially flying blind on how fast this handoff is happening. This legislation ensures that when frontier labs partner with federal evaluators, we understand who is actually training and improving these models.”\n\n“AI is beginning to play a role not just in solving problems, but in building the next generation of AI itself, and we need to understand what that means before the technology outruns our ability to measure it,” said Congressman Pat Harrigan. “I’m proud to co-lead the Self-Improving AI Monitoring Act to give NIST the visibility it needs to track these capabilities as they develop.”\n\nThe bill responds directly toPacing the Frontier, a July statement signed by more than 1,300 employees of leading AI companies – including CEOs, co-founders, and chief scientists – asking the U.S. government to support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development.\n\nThe Self-Improving AI Monitoring Act would:\n\nTrack AI self-improvement by directing Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) to monitor capability trends, specifically how AI systems autonomously research and develop subsequent AI models to drive scientific breakthroughs.\n\nAdd transparency to government-industry testing agreements by giving federal evaluators the authority to request internal developer metrics on AI-driven development, including estimates and methodologies for work completed without human review.\n\nStandardize autonomous R&D evaluations by ensuring federal pre-deployment evaluations directly test a frontier model’s ability to autonomously conduct AI research and development.\n\n###","url":"https://whitesides.house.gov/2026/08/29/rep-whitesides-introduces-bipartisan-bill-to-reduce-the-risk-of-superintelligent-ai-by-monitoring-self-improving-ai-systems/","published_at":"2026-08-29","ai_topics":["safety","transparency","research","regulation","national_security"],"ai_stance":"support","ai_summary":"Whitesides introduces the Self-Improving AI Monitoring Act to give federal evaluators visibility into frontier labs' automated AI R&D and reduce superintelligence risk.","ai_processed":true,"bill_ids":["f81273d3ca4e5add"],"ai_relevance_score":null,"bill_refs":[{"bill_id":"f81273d3ca4e5add","method":"title"}],"classifier":null}],"provenance":{"commit":"38624a3af16ec6b3fff9b27c7d1d9f2cb7fe9152","generated_at":"2026-09-11T15:06:57.105Z","schema_version":2,"manifest":"https://whovotedwhy.com/data/index.json"}}