Comment by Jay Burstein

If policymakers are worried about the most advanced systems, then oversight should focus on the highest-capability end of the stack. Commerce already moved in this direction when BIS proposed reporting requirements for advanced AI models and large computing clusters. The proposal was framed as a national security and industrial base tool, not a blanket licensing regime. That is the right instinct. Federal visibility into the largest compute clusters is a far more sensible way to track frontier activity than trying to halt development outright. That kind of oversight is targeted. It is rooted in actual capability thresholds. And it gives policymakers a way to monitor what matters most without smothering the rest of the ecosystem. If additional safeguards are needed for the most advanced systems, they should be automatic, narrow, and workable. The best approach would be threshold-based reporting, transparency expectations, and evaluation triggers tied to capability or deployment context. We cannot build a slow permission structure that forces developers to wait for approvals before they can move forward.
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AI Verified The quote clearly supports targeted, threshold-based reporting and federal oversight for the most advanced AI activity, calling BIS-style reporting requirements for advanced models/large compute clusters “the right instinct” and endorsing “threshold-based reporting” tied to capability. That implies support for mandatory reporting of very large training runs to a national authority, even though the exact 10^26 FLOPs threshold is not named. · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 13d ago
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AI Unverifiable The quote supports "threshold-based reporting" and "Federal visibility into the largest compute clusters," calling BIS-style reporting "the right instinct," but it does not specifically endorse the exact 10^26 FLOPs threshold or reporting training runs to a designated national or international authority. · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 13d ago

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AI Verified The passage is authentic and appears verbatim in the March 16, 2026 Build American AI article “We Cannot Afford To Pause AI.” The source page contains the exact quoted sentences, including the BIS/reporting paragraph, the compute-cluster oversight paragraph, and the closing sentence about not building a “slow permission structure,” and it identifies Jay Burstein on the page. ([buildamericanai.org](https://www.buildamericanai.org/blog-posts/we-cannot-afford-to-pause-ai)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 14d ago
AI Unverifiable Could not verify the verbatim quote or author attribution from the source. The source_url (buildamericanai.org/blog-posts/we-cannot-afford-to-pause-ai) returned HTTP 403 to direct fetch. Web search confirmed that the article "We Cannot Afford To Pause AI" genuinely exists on the Build American AI site, and its thesis is fully consistent with the stored quote (favoring targeted, threshold-based oversight of the highest-capability compute/models over halting development, citing the BIS reporting-requirements proposal, and opposing a "slow permission structure"). However, web search did NOT reproduce the specific quoted passages verbatim, nor could I independently confirm that the author is Jay Burstein (a Build American AI fellow) rather than another contributor. Because the source blocks fetching and the exact text/author could not be corroborated through any accessible secondary source, I am marking this ai_unverifiable rather than verified. Note: the vote "against" is clearly consistent with both the article's title/thesis and statement 451 ("Governments and labs should build the capability for a global slowdown of frontier AI development in case it's needed") — the piece explicitly argues against pausing/halting AI — so the only barrier to verification is the inability to confirm the verbatim quote and author from the blocked source. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-8 · 20d ago
replying to Jay Burstein