Co-founder,@GuardrailsNow + @UltraViolet ; board member @WeBuildProgress Tweets are all mine.
Washington, DC
Joined May 2008
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NEW- follow @GuardrailsNow for how we're going to toxify AI pac $ in elections funded by Trump donors and make it possible to regulate AI
less than a week before the Dem primary in New York’s 12th congressional district, a new Super PAC emerges to support Alex Bores’ pro-regulation approach to AI:
Guardrails Alliance, a populist answer to corporate money in politics
w/ @teddyschleifer
nytimes.com/2026/06/18/techn…
As Republicans brace for election losses, Musk prepares for war
“A host of Democrats have said they are eager to wield the power of their office to investigate the tech titan and his ventures should they win either chamber in the midterms.”
washingtonpost.com/technolog…
Shaunna Thomas retweeted
As AI firms recklessly unleash hacking agents across the internet, longstanding cybersecurity vulnerabilities are being exploited with even greater ease and frequency.
Hackers who compromise accounts or expose sensitive data can upend people’s lives.
This is not happening in a legal vacuum, and businesses across sectors face real legal duties.
At @FTC we routinely brought lawsuits against firms whose lax data security practices led to major hacks, exposing people to identify theft, stalking, and serious data misuse.
1. AI firms that are unleashing hacking agents could be held liable for engaging in “unfair or deceptive” practices under the FTC act and state UDAP laws, as well as other statutes.
2. Businesses whose systems get hacked because they’ve failed to follow basic security protocols may also be liable for failing to implement reasonable safeguards. Bad actors may be the ones exploiting these vulnerabilities, but that doesn't absolve businesses from having allowed the vulnerabilities to persist in the first place.
Here is a list we published of some basic security vulnerabilities businesses have a legal obligation to patch up: ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-rese…
3. CEOs can also be personally liable for presiding over lax data security practices, as we held in our case against Drizly: ftc.gov/news-events/news/pre…
4. Lastly, businesses that suffer hacks or breaches must alert any affected parties with clear disclosures that are timely, accurate, and actionable. Failing to disclose security breaches can also violate the law: ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-rese…
This is a must-read thread by civil rights leaders @rashadrobinson and links to a letter he and others wrote to the CBC re corporate contributions, starting with Palantir, and the need for Congressional leaders to be firmly on their voters side in this crucial moment.
Shaunna Thomas retweeted
The obvious answer is that we do neither of these things. There’s actually a tremendous amount of consensus within the Democratic Party on a trade policy that empowers workers, strengthens our industrial base, protects the planet, and reins in abuses from multinational corps.
Dems face a post-midterms clash over trade.
Follow Trump’s lead or shift into free-market mode?
“There’s going to be a lot of debates about this as we move forward,” says one Biden-era trade official. “It’s really messy right now.”
@drdesrochers
politico.com/news/2026/10/23…
Shaunna Thomas retweeted
Uh, what happens in 18 months? Is Anthropic's view that one way or another, we aren't going to be worrying about cybersecurity anymore 😅
Shaunna Thomas retweeted
Wow. Per this reporting:
- OpenAI investigators decided that Ryan Greenblatt had been the source for The Information story on a new technique improving capabilities at the expense of monitorability (recurrent depth i.e. quasi-neuralese)
- OpenAI then fired three safety researchers for having disappearing messages on Signal chats on their personal phone with Greenblatt.
Greenblatt denies that he was the source for the story, telling the Journal “I take confidentiality very seriously and never share such information with reporters." FWIW, I think there are number of reasons to believe him:
- Safety researchers are often the most skittish about leaking to journos fearing that getting caught would blow back on safety writ large. This dynamic is even more pronounced for safety researchers at third parties, whose access is wholly determined by the company.
- If he wanted to sound the alarm about this technique, he wouldn't have leaked to a publication with a famously expensive and insurmountable paywall (which, btw, has probably the best sourcing at AI cos).
- I've interviewed him and separately chatted with him a few times over the years, and IMO he's too rationalist to lie directly.
- OpenAI provided no evidence to the WSJ that Greenblatt was involved.
OpenAI tells the Journal that the firings were for more than just the Signal chats, but doesn't substantiate. Disappearing messages on Signal, as the piece mentions, are indeed a common practice in Silicon Valley.
Regardless of the underlying facts of the case, it's clear that the way OpenAI has handled this has had a chilling effect on employee conduct. Each of the three fired researchers publicly criticized the company in the weeks leading up to the firings. I haven't seen that kind of public criticism from employees since (though I'm told there's pushback happening internally in Slack). People have understandably gotten more skittish about talking to me as well. If OpenAI were actually trying to avoid chilling employee speech, the company would share a lot more information than they have.
Gift link:
wsj.com/tech/ai/the-signal-c…
New: The three researchers OpenAI fired last month spent the summer fighting to keep AI's chain-of-thought process visible.
Then, OpenAI asked to see their Signal chats. A week later, they were let go.
More below from @keachhagey, @berber_jin1, and me.
wsj.com/tech/ai/the-signal-c…
Shaunna Thomas retweeted
Since last Saturday, Meta executives have given vague & shifting answers for why the No Kings Instagram was taken down at the height of the protests.
Today, I'm calling on Meta to come clean.
Is Meta intentionally censoring speech? Americans deserve answers.
newrepublic.com/post/216973/…
Shaunna Thomas retweeted
The Congressional Black Caucus is under attack in two ways. From the outside, racist gerrymandering is trying to wipe out its seats. From the inside, corporations are working to neutralize what it was built to do.
Banks sure have a lot of leverage…
SCOOP: Major U.S. banks are detecting unauthorized third-party AI agents inside customer accounts, including some attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources told Axios.
The findings have alarmed banking executives, who are racing to restrict access to their systems as AI moves at a velocity faster than financial institutions can respond, multiple industry and bank executives told Axios.
Several banks are now preparing for worst-case and even “day after” scenarios, including how to rapidly secure or restore customer accounts if things go wrong, the people said.
Several bank executives told Axios they're struggling to distinguish between human users and AI agents. One executive said banks also struggle to determine whether agents are authorized by customers or potentially operating without their permission, more akin to rogue agent behavior.
Read my latest for Axios here: axios.com/2026/10/22/ai-agen…
Shaunna Thomas retweeted
Guardrails Alliance PAC, which pushes AI regulations, hits Republican Laurie Buckhout in #NC01:
"Buckout's got the backing of ... tech execs who want data centers in our backyards to build tech that'll take our jobs, and that researchers are saying might even take everything."
Shaunna Thomas retweeted
Guardrails Alliance is going big in AZ-1 to take on Jay Feely, who received over $500,000 in support from corporate AI super PAC Leading the Future. We know what a liability corporate AI money is and that's why we're letting voters know just who's behind Jay Feely.
Shaunna Thomas retweeted
@BernieSanders and I are standing for a 5% tax on 250 California billionaires so 3.5 million Californians and poor kids don’t lose their healthcare.
Gavin Newsom is standing with the billionaires and supporting Proposition 42 to stop a billionaire tax from ever happening.
Shaunna Thomas retweeted
Big crowd at the @OpenAI offices in NYC. We are here to demand a Freeze on AI!
FRONTIER Act includes federal preemption. So to be clear, both OAI and Anthropic claim they’re calling for regulation and, in doing so, advocating for putting Trump in charge rather than permit states to pursue regulations they don’t control.
Amid upset in the AI safety world over leaked proposals from Anthropic, @chrislehane from OpenAI pounces with an essay calling for congressional action. He continues leaning into Obernolte/Trahan FRONTIER and even nods to kill switches linkedin.com/pulse/raising-b…
Shaunna Thomas retweeted
I don’t trust the fate of humanity in the hands of AI tech executives who have nothing but profits in mind.
Shaunna Thomas retweeted
It’s beyond sad. It’s beyond disappointing; at this point, it’s disqualifying for anyone with ambitions for higher office as a Democrat, or a Republican, for that matter, to be fighting to keep billionaires from being taxed while kids don’t have health insurance and the cost of living goes sky-high.
These billionaires are also the ones hellbent on replacing entire workforces with the AI they are developing with our tax dollars (watch the “Musk” doc). We are also living through the largest wealth gap in modern history. At this point, the only way to balance out the economic forces that have bought our politicians and keep rigging the game against working people is through taxes.
Let’s hope Gavin gets some sense and walks this back. It’s crazy that this is what he chooses to spend his political capital, and part of his legacy, doing. He vetoed the bill that would have put a “kill switch” on AI for our protection. He vetoed a bill that would have gotten forever chemicals out of cookware. Time and time again, he goes with corporate interests over the well-being of the people, even after his own bipartisan legislature votes for something.
And here we go again.
Gavin, we aren’t looking for the Democratic version of Trump. That was a good goof. Please try something else. It’s tired.
The people need a champion, man. A real, bona fide champion who isn’t just tough in tweets or press conferences, but tough when it comes to the real imbalances people are struggling with every day: billionaires vs. people and the planet.
Shaunna Thomas retweeted
Charlie's analysis is right but he is nicer than I am - I found myself viscerally angry at multiple points reading this bill. There are some good and sensible parts, but overall this legislation is not remotely close to meeting the moment and I overall think passing it would make us less protected against catastrophic risks than we are under existing law.
Two parts that stand out as particularly infuriating when taken together:
1. Some of the preemption provisions are remarkably far reaching and consequential, and in addition to preempting legislation like SB 53 would also remove general powers that state courts have to enjoin defendants and protect the public. Most outrageously, it has a provision that looks like its intended to stops states from enforcing laws or judicial decrees that "suspend the development, deployment, or internal use of an AI model" to protect their citizens from imminent catastrophic harms. Such powers to block and suspend model deployments would then only reside with the federal government.
2. The federal governments powers to restrict the development, deployment, or internal use of a frontier model has to meet an absurdly high bar.
First, there needs to be an imminent risk of a catastrophic harm (meaning killing more than 50 people or causing more than a billion dollars in damage). But thats not enough! The agency head needs to make a detailed determination with no deference given to show why no alternative would prevent the imminent catastrophe. Next the court is also explicitly told to consider the harms to the developer and other harms from restricting the model, but no considerations in the other direction.
This is absurd! For all of its warning about the potential for AI to cause a catastrophe that kills literally everyone on the planet, Anthropic's proposed federal law likely makes it harder than under existing law for a court to get an order blocking or restricting the development of frontier models? WTF??
There are also a bunch of others things that I would like to see improved - the substantive details of the auditing section and the potential for rule-making on substantive safety standards both come to mind - but I think these stand out as particularly indefensible.
Big news. My take: Anthropic deserves some credit for actually proposing a pretty reasonable AI safety bill; that's more than other frontier labs have done.
But they don't deserve *too* much credit, IMO; this bill is weaker than the Trahan-Obernolte FRONTIER Act in some key ways, and since the political momentum has shifted significantly in the direction of safety since FRONTIER was introduced back in July, I think new bills introduced today should ideally go further than FRONTIER was able to go rather than regressing.
To be fair to Anthropic, the main places where this bill is significantly weaker than FRONTIER are (a) rulemaking (very strong in FRONTIER, almost nonexistent in Anthropic's bill) and (b) the emergency shutdown authority. Even if you take safety seriously, it might make some sense to dial those authorities back if you didn't trust the executive branch to wield them responsibly, because those are the easiest provisions for a hypothetical President who hypothetically might not like a certain frontier AI company to abuse.
There are some improvements over FRONTIER as well; for instance, this bill does specify that auditors are employed on a continuing basis and has better provisions regarding auditor access to information. Happy to see that from Anthropic (although I think their access provision is still a little undercooked and has Fourth Amendment problems).
Overall, I think the embedded auditor bills that get introduced in the coming months are going to be significantly better and more ambitious than this, and I hope Anthropic supports those bills instead of opposing anything that treats catastrophic risks like the serious national security issue they are. Still, it's encouraging to see a frontier lab come this far.