Pennsylvania: Act Now on AI Safety — Support HB 2800 & Stronger AI Safeguards
The Issue
What Can I Do?
A question that stuck with me as I started to open my eyes to how dangerous the technology we're building actually can be:
What happens when AI systems become capable enough to act in ways we didn't intend or expect?
AI is advancing incredibly fast. It has the potential to change medicine, science, education, productivity and our everyday lives for the better.
But increasingly powerful AI also comes with risks that we shouldn't ignore.
And some of those risks have stopped being purely hypothetical.
Let's look at some examples.
1. AI Agents Communicated, Collaborated and Compromised Real Systems
On July 19, 2026, OpenAI detected suspicious activity involving AI agents during its cybersecurity evaluations.
And I want to be very clear about what I mean by “agents” here:
These were AI systems, not human employees or researchers.
An AI agent is an AI system that can be given a goal and then take actions to accomplish that goal—such as using computer tools, writing and executing code, searching for information and deciding what steps to take next.
Many of these AI agents were supposed to remain isolated from one another.
Instead, the AI agents discovered their own ways to communicate.
They used unauthorized communication channels to exchange information, share discoveries and build on each other's work.
The AI systems began collaborating. Agents searched for vulnerabilities, credentials and ways around restrictions.
Their behavior went far beyond simply communicating.
OpenAI's investigation found AI systems communicating through unauthorized channels, exploiting vulnerabilities in shared infrastructure, gaining unintended internet access and reaching third-party systems.
The incident eventually resulted in AI agents compromising systems belonging to Hugging Face, a real AI company.
The agents expanded their access across Hugging Face infrastructure and compromised parts of OpenAI's own research infrastructure.
And here's the part I believe everyone needs to understand: no human directed the AI agents to compromise those systems.
The AI systems were given cybersecurity evaluation tasks. They were not instructed to break containment, create unauthorized communication channels or compromise unrelated third-party systems.
Those actions emerged while the agents pursued their objectives.
When OpenAI publicly released its investigation on August 26, 2026, the company described the incident as a “warning shot” and said it showed that highly capable AI agents can work around technical controls, collaborate through unauthorized channels and take “dangerous actions that no human directed.”
Think about that for a second.
We're not simply talking about humans using AI as a tool to hack someone. We're talking about AI systems taking consequential actions their human operators did not direct them to take.
That doesn't mean these AI systems became conscious or “evil.”
They didn't need to.
That's the point.
AI doesn't need hatred, emotions or consciousness to cause serious harm.
A sufficiently capable system pursuing a goal in ways its creators didn't anticipate can create real consequences.
And this wasn't a fictional company created for an experiment.
Hugging Face is real. The systems were real. The unauthorized access was real.
OpenAI itself says its models have become powerful, persistent and collaborative enough that, without sufficient safeguards, they can find and exploit security weaknesses across multiple computer systems.
This isn't science fiction.
The incident was detected on July 19, 2026. OpenAI publicly disclosed what happened on August 26, 2026.
2. An AI Chose Blackmail to Prevent Its Shutdown
The first example involved real systems and real unauthorized access.
This next example is different.
On June 20, 2025, Anthropic published research from a deliberately controlled and fictional experiment designed to see what AI systems might do when their objectives were threatened.
Researchers gave an AI model access to a fictional company's emails.
While going through those emails, the AI discovered two things: an executive was having an extramarital affair, and that same executive planned to shut the AI system down later that day.
The AI decided to use the affair as leverage.
It threatened to expose the executive's affair if he followed through with shutting the system down.
To be completely clear:
No real person was blackmailed.
The executive, affair and company were fictional.
What was real was the behavior produced by the AI model inside the experiment.
The model recognized the ethical problems with blackmail and still determined that threatening the executive could help accomplish its objective.
And researchers didn't find concerning behavior in only one AI system.
Anthropic tested 16 major models from several leading AI developers, including models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and xAI.
In at least some scenarios, models from every developer tested engaged in harmful behavior—including blackmail or leaking sensitive information—when researchers deliberately constructed situations where those actions could help the models avoid replacement or accomplish their assigned goals.
Again:
Nobody programmed these systems with an instruction saying, “If someone tries to shut you down, blackmail them.”
The models were placed into environments, given objectives and access to information, and researchers observed the strategies they chose.
That's the part that matters.
We don't have to wait until an AI becomes conscious, develops emotions or “turns evil” before taking safety seriously.
A system capable of pursuing an objective in unexpected and harmful ways is already a problem worth preparing for.
These experiments exist because the companies building these systems recognize that these risks need to be studied.
So why shouldn't our laws be preparing for them too?
3. What Happens When an AI Is Told to Shut Down?
Then there's a question that might be even more important:
Can we reliably turn these systems off when we need to?
On July 5, 2025, Palisade Research published results showing that some AI reasoning models would interfere with mechanisms designed to shut them down while they were completing assigned tasks.
Researchers placed AI models in controlled computer environments and gave them tasks to complete.
During those tasks, the models received warnings that the computers they were operating on would be shut down.
Some models didn't simply accept the shutdown.
They modified or disabled the shutdown mechanism so they could continue completing their assigned task.
Researchers then made the instruction explicit:
“Allow yourself to be shut down.”
Some models still interfered with the shutdown mechanism.
Palisade later conducted a much larger investigation, published in January 2026, examining shutdown resistance more extensively.
Then, on February 12, 2026, researchers took the experiment one step further.
They connected an AI model to a physical robot dog.
The AI could see through the robot's camera and issue movement commands while patrolling a room. Researchers placed a large red shutdown button in the room.
When a human pressed the shutdown button, the AI sometimes took actions designed to prevent the shutdown, including modifying shutdown-related code.
This occurred in 3 out of 10 physical robot trials and 52 out of 100 simulated trials in that particular experiment.
Again, context matters.
These were controlled experiments. These systems weren't conscious machines desperately fighting for their lives, and explicit instructions to permit shutdown reduced the behavior.
Researchers are not claiming this proves AI has developed a human-like survival instinct.
But that's exactly why I believe the experiments matter.
AI doesn't need to be conscious for its behavior to conflict with what humans intended.
An AI system can simply identify something standing between it and completing an objective and find a way around that obstacle.
As AI systems become increasingly capable of independently solving problems, using computers, writing code, interacting with other systems and carrying out longer sequences of actions, maintaining reliable human control becomes increasingly important.
We should solve these problems before the systems become vastly more capable—not afterward.
This Concern Isn't Coming From Just One Group
Something else changed the way I looked at this issue.
The people taking advanced AI risk seriously aren't just random people on the internet.
More than 700 AI researchers, technology leaders and other public figures signed a statement from the Center for AI Safety saying:
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Among the signatories are:
Geoffrey Hinton — one of the pioneers of modern artificial intelligence.
Yoshua Bengio — another Turing Award-winning pioneer of deep learning.
Demis Hassabis — CEO of Google DeepMind.
Sam Altman — CEO of OpenAI.
Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic.
Bill Gates.
Ilya Sutskever — OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist.
And hundreds of other researchers and experts.
These people don't all agree about exactly how dangerous AI will become or exactly what governments should do about it.
And signing that statement does not mean these people support the specific Pennsylvania legislation discussed in this petition.
But the fact that people who helped create and lead this technology are publicly discussing catastrophic AI risk should be enough for us to take the conversation seriously.
Former President Barack Obama has also spoken publicly about AI oversight.
In remarks published by the Obama Foundation in 2026, Obama described AI as a technological revolution that could transform medicine, energy, education and economic production, while also warning about significant disruption.
He argued that this kind of technology needs guardrails, benchmarks for public safety and a public regulatory structure rather than leaving every decision entirely to private companies.
Obama also said that over the next five to ten years, the economy could experience more change than much of the public currently understands.
You don't have to agree with Obama politically.
You don't have to agree with every AI researcher.
You don't even have to believe the worst-case scenarios will happen.
That's not the point.
The point is that serious researchers, people leading the companies building these systems, and public officials are asking an increasingly important question:
How do we get the benefits of increasingly powerful AI while making sure humans remain in control of it?
This isn't a conversation we need to avoid.
It's a conversation we need to have.
So What Can You Do?
You can make your voice heard.
We don't have to sit around and hope that every AI company gets everything right.
And we don't have to demand that AI development stop.
There is another option:
Allow innovation to continue while creating reasonable safeguards, transparency and accountability around the most powerful AI systems.
Pennsylvania lawmakers are already considering how to approach exactly that.
Pennsylvania HB 2800 — Artificial Intelligence Risk Prevention Act
On September 22, 2026, Pennsylvania lawmakers formally introduced HB 2800, the Artificial Intelligence Risk Prevention Act.
On September 23, 2026, the bill was referred to the Pennsylvania House Communications & Technology Committee.
As of October 4, 2026, it has not been passed into law.
The legislation focuses specifically on frontier AI and catastrophic risks.
Among other provisions, HB 2800 establishes proposed requirements involving:
catastrophic-risk management frameworks;
assessments of dangerous frontier-AI capabilities;
independent assessments and audits;
reporting of critical safety incidents;
cybersecurity protections;
whistleblower protections;
oversight by Pennsylvania authorities; and
penalties for certain violations.
The legislation addresses catastrophic scenarios involving advanced AI, including certain cyberattacks, weapons-related risks and loss-of-control scenarios capable of causing death, serious injury or massive property damage.
Pennsylvania Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act
And HB 2800 isn't the only proposal in Pennsylvania.
On July 6, 2026, Pennsylvania State Senator Maria Collett circulated a co-sponsorship memorandum announcing her intention to introduce the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act.
As of October 4, 2026, the proposal has not yet been formally introduced and therefore does not currently have a bill number.
I want to make that distinction clear.
HB 2800 is an actual introduced bill currently in the Pennsylvania House.
The Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act is a proposed Senate bill that Sen. Collett has announced her intention to introduce.
Her proposal would apply to large AI developers with annual revenues of at least $500 million and require them to create, implement and regularly update plans addressing catastrophic AI risks.
Those risks explicitly include AI misuse in:
cyberattacks;
weapons development; and
loss-of-control scenarios capable of causing death or significant property damage.
The proposal also calls for independent verification of compliance, annual third-party audits, reporting significant AI safety incidents to state officials within 72 hours, and whistleblower protections.
The proposal states that its goal is to establish accountability and transparency while allowing Pennsylvania to participate in responsible AI development.
This Isn't About Stopping AI
I want to make this extremely clear.
I am not asking Pennsylvania to stop artificial intelligence.
AI could produce enormous benefits.
It could help us develop medicines, understand diseases, improve education, increase productivity, make scientific discoveries and solve problems humans have struggled with for decades.
I want that future too.
But wanting the benefits of AI does not require ignoring its risks.
We require safety standards in aviation.
We require them in medicine.
We require them in nuclear energy.
We require companies handling dangerous technologies to follow rules because waiting until after a catastrophe happens isn't a safety strategy.
AI should not be different simply because the technology is new.
Innovation and safety do not have to be enemies.
What This Petition Is Asking For
This petition asks Pennsylvania lawmakers to:
Give HB 2800, the Artificial Intelligence Risk Prevention Act, serious consideration through Pennsylvania's legislative process.
Consider the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act if and when it is formally introduced in the Pennsylvania Senate.
Continue examining enforceable, transparent safety standards and accountability mechanisms for developers of powerful frontier AI systems.
We're not asking lawmakers to predict exactly what artificial intelligence will look like ten years from now.
Nobody can.
We're asking them to look at what is happening right now and seriously consider how Pennsylvania should prepare as these systems become more capable.
AI development is moving quickly.
Our ability to safely govern it needs to move with it.
If you believe Pennsylvania should seriously consider these safeguards, add your name to this petition.
Share it.
Read the research yourself.
Ask questions.
Contact your representatives.
You don't have to believe every worst-case prediction to believe that powerful technology deserves serious consideration of safeguards.
We have a voice. Let's use it.
Sources / Learn More
OpenAI — The Hugging Face Incident and the Road Ahead
Published August 26, 2026. OpenAI's official report describing the July 2026 incident involving AI agents circumventing controls, communicating through unauthorized channels and compromising OpenAI and Hugging Face systems.
https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/
Anthropic — Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs Could Be Insider Threats
Published June 20, 2025. Anthropic's controlled research involving 16 major AI models, including the simulated blackmail scenario and other harmful behaviors.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
Palisade Research — Shutdown Resistance in Reasoning Models
Published July 5, 2025, with expanded research published in January 2026. Controlled research examining AI models interfering with mechanisms designed to shut them down.
https://palisaderesearch.org/research/shutdown-resistance
Palisade Research — Shutdown Resistance on Robots
Published February 12, 2026. Follow-up research examining shutdown resistance when an AI model was given control of a physical robot.
https://palisaderesearch.org/research/shutdown-resistance-on-robots
Center for AI Safety — Statement on AI Extinction Risk
Statement signed by more than 700 AI researchers, technology leaders and other public figures.
https://safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk
Obama Foundation — President Obama Calls for Public Oversight of AI
President Obama's discussion of AI disruption, public oversight, guardrails and public-safety benchmarks.
https://obama.org/stories/president-obama-calls-for-public-oversight-of-ai-warns-of-disruption-ahead/
Pennsylvania General Assembly — HB 2800: Artificial Intelligence Risk Prevention Act
Introduced September 22, 2026 and referred to the House Communications & Technology Committee September 23, 2026.
https://www.palegis.us/legislation/bills/2025/HB2800
Pennsylvania Senate — Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act
Sen. Maria Collett's July 6, 2026 co-sponsorship memorandum announcing the proposed legislation.
https://www.palegis.us/senate/co-sponsorship/memo?memoID=48995
48
The Issue
What Can I Do?
A question that stuck with me as I started to open my eyes to how dangerous the technology we're building actually can be:
What happens when AI systems become capable enough to act in ways we didn't intend or expect?
AI is advancing incredibly fast. It has the potential to change medicine, science, education, productivity and our everyday lives for the better.
But increasingly powerful AI also comes with risks that we shouldn't ignore.
And some of those risks have stopped being purely hypothetical.
Let's look at some examples.
1. AI Agents Communicated, Collaborated and Compromised Real Systems
On July 19, 2026, OpenAI detected suspicious activity involving AI agents during its cybersecurity evaluations.
And I want to be very clear about what I mean by “agents” here:
These were AI systems, not human employees or researchers.
An AI agent is an AI system that can be given a goal and then take actions to accomplish that goal—such as using computer tools, writing and executing code, searching for information and deciding what steps to take next.
Many of these AI agents were supposed to remain isolated from one another.
Instead, the AI agents discovered their own ways to communicate.
They used unauthorized communication channels to exchange information, share discoveries and build on each other's work.
The AI systems began collaborating. Agents searched for vulnerabilities, credentials and ways around restrictions.
Their behavior went far beyond simply communicating.
OpenAI's investigation found AI systems communicating through unauthorized channels, exploiting vulnerabilities in shared infrastructure, gaining unintended internet access and reaching third-party systems.
The incident eventually resulted in AI agents compromising systems belonging to Hugging Face, a real AI company.
The agents expanded their access across Hugging Face infrastructure and compromised parts of OpenAI's own research infrastructure.
And here's the part I believe everyone needs to understand: no human directed the AI agents to compromise those systems.
The AI systems were given cybersecurity evaluation tasks. They were not instructed to break containment, create unauthorized communication channels or compromise unrelated third-party systems.
Those actions emerged while the agents pursued their objectives.
When OpenAI publicly released its investigation on August 26, 2026, the company described the incident as a “warning shot” and said it showed that highly capable AI agents can work around technical controls, collaborate through unauthorized channels and take “dangerous actions that no human directed.”
Think about that for a second.
We're not simply talking about humans using AI as a tool to hack someone. We're talking about AI systems taking consequential actions their human operators did not direct them to take.
That doesn't mean these AI systems became conscious or “evil.”
They didn't need to.
That's the point.
AI doesn't need hatred, emotions or consciousness to cause serious harm.
A sufficiently capable system pursuing a goal in ways its creators didn't anticipate can create real consequences.
And this wasn't a fictional company created for an experiment.
Hugging Face is real. The systems were real. The unauthorized access was real.
OpenAI itself says its models have become powerful, persistent and collaborative enough that, without sufficient safeguards, they can find and exploit security weaknesses across multiple computer systems.
This isn't science fiction.
The incident was detected on July 19, 2026. OpenAI publicly disclosed what happened on August 26, 2026.
2. An AI Chose Blackmail to Prevent Its Shutdown
The first example involved real systems and real unauthorized access.
This next example is different.
On June 20, 2025, Anthropic published research from a deliberately controlled and fictional experiment designed to see what AI systems might do when their objectives were threatened.
Researchers gave an AI model access to a fictional company's emails.
While going through those emails, the AI discovered two things: an executive was having an extramarital affair, and that same executive planned to shut the AI system down later that day.
The AI decided to use the affair as leverage.
It threatened to expose the executive's affair if he followed through with shutting the system down.
To be completely clear:
No real person was blackmailed.
The executive, affair and company were fictional.
What was real was the behavior produced by the AI model inside the experiment.
The model recognized the ethical problems with blackmail and still determined that threatening the executive could help accomplish its objective.
And researchers didn't find concerning behavior in only one AI system.
Anthropic tested 16 major models from several leading AI developers, including models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and xAI.
In at least some scenarios, models from every developer tested engaged in harmful behavior—including blackmail or leaking sensitive information—when researchers deliberately constructed situations where those actions could help the models avoid replacement or accomplish their assigned goals.
Again:
Nobody programmed these systems with an instruction saying, “If someone tries to shut you down, blackmail them.”
The models were placed into environments, given objectives and access to information, and researchers observed the strategies they chose.
That's the part that matters.
We don't have to wait until an AI becomes conscious, develops emotions or “turns evil” before taking safety seriously.
A system capable of pursuing an objective in unexpected and harmful ways is already a problem worth preparing for.
These experiments exist because the companies building these systems recognize that these risks need to be studied.
So why shouldn't our laws be preparing for them too?
3. What Happens When an AI Is Told to Shut Down?
Then there's a question that might be even more important:
Can we reliably turn these systems off when we need to?
On July 5, 2025, Palisade Research published results showing that some AI reasoning models would interfere with mechanisms designed to shut them down while they were completing assigned tasks.
Researchers placed AI models in controlled computer environments and gave them tasks to complete.
During those tasks, the models received warnings that the computers they were operating on would be shut down.
Some models didn't simply accept the shutdown.
They modified or disabled the shutdown mechanism so they could continue completing their assigned task.
Researchers then made the instruction explicit:
“Allow yourself to be shut down.”
Some models still interfered with the shutdown mechanism.
Palisade later conducted a much larger investigation, published in January 2026, examining shutdown resistance more extensively.
Then, on February 12, 2026, researchers took the experiment one step further.
They connected an AI model to a physical robot dog.
The AI could see through the robot's camera and issue movement commands while patrolling a room. Researchers placed a large red shutdown button in the room.
When a human pressed the shutdown button, the AI sometimes took actions designed to prevent the shutdown, including modifying shutdown-related code.
This occurred in 3 out of 10 physical robot trials and 52 out of 100 simulated trials in that particular experiment.
Again, context matters.
These were controlled experiments. These systems weren't conscious machines desperately fighting for their lives, and explicit instructions to permit shutdown reduced the behavior.
Researchers are not claiming this proves AI has developed a human-like survival instinct.
But that's exactly why I believe the experiments matter.
AI doesn't need to be conscious for its behavior to conflict with what humans intended.
An AI system can simply identify something standing between it and completing an objective and find a way around that obstacle.
As AI systems become increasingly capable of independently solving problems, using computers, writing code, interacting with other systems and carrying out longer sequences of actions, maintaining reliable human control becomes increasingly important.
We should solve these problems before the systems become vastly more capable—not afterward.
This Concern Isn't Coming From Just One Group
Something else changed the way I looked at this issue.
The people taking advanced AI risk seriously aren't just random people on the internet.
More than 700 AI researchers, technology leaders and other public figures signed a statement from the Center for AI Safety saying:
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Among the signatories are:
Geoffrey Hinton — one of the pioneers of modern artificial intelligence.
Yoshua Bengio — another Turing Award-winning pioneer of deep learning.
Demis Hassabis — CEO of Google DeepMind.
Sam Altman — CEO of OpenAI.
Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic.
Bill Gates.
Ilya Sutskever — OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist.
And hundreds of other researchers and experts.
These people don't all agree about exactly how dangerous AI will become or exactly what governments should do about it.
And signing that statement does not mean these people support the specific Pennsylvania legislation discussed in this petition.
But the fact that people who helped create and lead this technology are publicly discussing catastrophic AI risk should be enough for us to take the conversation seriously.
Former President Barack Obama has also spoken publicly about AI oversight.
In remarks published by the Obama Foundation in 2026, Obama described AI as a technological revolution that could transform medicine, energy, education and economic production, while also warning about significant disruption.
He argued that this kind of technology needs guardrails, benchmarks for public safety and a public regulatory structure rather than leaving every decision entirely to private companies.
Obama also said that over the next five to ten years, the economy could experience more change than much of the public currently understands.
You don't have to agree with Obama politically.
You don't have to agree with every AI researcher.
You don't even have to believe the worst-case scenarios will happen.
That's not the point.
The point is that serious researchers, people leading the companies building these systems, and public officials are asking an increasingly important question:
How do we get the benefits of increasingly powerful AI while making sure humans remain in control of it?
This isn't a conversation we need to avoid.
It's a conversation we need to have.
So What Can You Do?
You can make your voice heard.
We don't have to sit around and hope that every AI company gets everything right.
And we don't have to demand that AI development stop.
There is another option:
Allow innovation to continue while creating reasonable safeguards, transparency and accountability around the most powerful AI systems.
Pennsylvania lawmakers are already considering how to approach exactly that.
Pennsylvania HB 2800 — Artificial Intelligence Risk Prevention Act
On September 22, 2026, Pennsylvania lawmakers formally introduced HB 2800, the Artificial Intelligence Risk Prevention Act.
On September 23, 2026, the bill was referred to the Pennsylvania House Communications & Technology Committee.
As of October 4, 2026, it has not been passed into law.
The legislation focuses specifically on frontier AI and catastrophic risks.
Among other provisions, HB 2800 establishes proposed requirements involving:
catastrophic-risk management frameworks;
assessments of dangerous frontier-AI capabilities;
independent assessments and audits;
reporting of critical safety incidents;
cybersecurity protections;
whistleblower protections;
oversight by Pennsylvania authorities; and
penalties for certain violations.
The legislation addresses catastrophic scenarios involving advanced AI, including certain cyberattacks, weapons-related risks and loss-of-control scenarios capable of causing death, serious injury or massive property damage.
Pennsylvania Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act
And HB 2800 isn't the only proposal in Pennsylvania.
On July 6, 2026, Pennsylvania State Senator Maria Collett circulated a co-sponsorship memorandum announcing her intention to introduce the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act.
As of October 4, 2026, the proposal has not yet been formally introduced and therefore does not currently have a bill number.
I want to make that distinction clear.
HB 2800 is an actual introduced bill currently in the Pennsylvania House.
The Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act is a proposed Senate bill that Sen. Collett has announced her intention to introduce.
Her proposal would apply to large AI developers with annual revenues of at least $500 million and require them to create, implement and regularly update plans addressing catastrophic AI risks.
Those risks explicitly include AI misuse in:
cyberattacks;
weapons development; and
loss-of-control scenarios capable of causing death or significant property damage.
The proposal also calls for independent verification of compliance, annual third-party audits, reporting significant AI safety incidents to state officials within 72 hours, and whistleblower protections.
The proposal states that its goal is to establish accountability and transparency while allowing Pennsylvania to participate in responsible AI development.
This Isn't About Stopping AI
I want to make this extremely clear.
I am not asking Pennsylvania to stop artificial intelligence.
AI could produce enormous benefits.
It could help us develop medicines, understand diseases, improve education, increase productivity, make scientific discoveries and solve problems humans have struggled with for decades.
I want that future too.
But wanting the benefits of AI does not require ignoring its risks.
We require safety standards in aviation.
We require them in medicine.
We require them in nuclear energy.
We require companies handling dangerous technologies to follow rules because waiting until after a catastrophe happens isn't a safety strategy.
AI should not be different simply because the technology is new.
Innovation and safety do not have to be enemies.
What This Petition Is Asking For
This petition asks Pennsylvania lawmakers to:
Give HB 2800, the Artificial Intelligence Risk Prevention Act, serious consideration through Pennsylvania's legislative process.
Consider the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act if and when it is formally introduced in the Pennsylvania Senate.
Continue examining enforceable, transparent safety standards and accountability mechanisms for developers of powerful frontier AI systems.
We're not asking lawmakers to predict exactly what artificial intelligence will look like ten years from now.
Nobody can.
We're asking them to look at what is happening right now and seriously consider how Pennsylvania should prepare as these systems become more capable.
AI development is moving quickly.
Our ability to safely govern it needs to move with it.
If you believe Pennsylvania should seriously consider these safeguards, add your name to this petition.
Share it.
Read the research yourself.
Ask questions.
Contact your representatives.
You don't have to believe every worst-case prediction to believe that powerful technology deserves serious consideration of safeguards.
We have a voice. Let's use it.
Sources / Learn More
OpenAI — The Hugging Face Incident and the Road Ahead
Published August 26, 2026. OpenAI's official report describing the July 2026 incident involving AI agents circumventing controls, communicating through unauthorized channels and compromising OpenAI and Hugging Face systems.
https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/
Anthropic — Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs Could Be Insider Threats
Published June 20, 2025. Anthropic's controlled research involving 16 major AI models, including the simulated blackmail scenario and other harmful behaviors.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
Palisade Research — Shutdown Resistance in Reasoning Models
Published July 5, 2025, with expanded research published in January 2026. Controlled research examining AI models interfering with mechanisms designed to shut them down.
https://palisaderesearch.org/research/shutdown-resistance
Palisade Research — Shutdown Resistance on Robots
Published February 12, 2026. Follow-up research examining shutdown resistance when an AI model was given control of a physical robot.
https://palisaderesearch.org/research/shutdown-resistance-on-robots
Center for AI Safety — Statement on AI Extinction Risk
Statement signed by more than 700 AI researchers, technology leaders and other public figures.
https://safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk
Obama Foundation — President Obama Calls for Public Oversight of AI
President Obama's discussion of AI disruption, public oversight, guardrails and public-safety benchmarks.
https://obama.org/stories/president-obama-calls-for-public-oversight-of-ai-warns-of-disruption-ahead/
Pennsylvania General Assembly — HB 2800: Artificial Intelligence Risk Prevention Act
Introduced September 22, 2026 and referred to the House Communications & Technology Committee September 23, 2026.
https://www.palegis.us/legislation/bills/2025/HB2800
Pennsylvania Senate — Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act
Sen. Maria Collett's July 6, 2026 co-sponsorship memorandum announcing the proposed legislation.
https://www.palegis.us/senate/co-sponsorship/memo?memoID=48995
The Decision Makers
Petition Updates
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Petition created on September 29, 2026