Comment by CASRAI Editorial Board

Where export controls act on chips before they’re sold, FLOP-reporting thresholds act on training runs after compute has already been acquired — they require a developer to report to a regulator once a training run crosses a defined amount of compute, measured in floating-point operations. … California SB 53 uses a training-compute threshold of 10^{26} operations — ten times the EU figure — to define which developers count as “frontier developers” subject to its transparency obligations; the same order-of-magnitude threshold was used in the earlier federal AI-reporting requirement it draws on.