Schiff proposes NDAA antitrust shield for AI release delays

Schiff's SA 6013 is still only a proposed floor amendment to the fiscal 2027 National Defense Authorization Act, and Inside Cybersecurity reports the Senate has more than 700 amendments pending before it resumes consideration next week. If adopted, the amendment would say that two or more non-federal entities do not violate federal antitrust laws when they exchange information or coordinate strategies for the exclusive purpose of addressing a covered artificial intelligence security risk. The live use case is obvious: competing AI developers, defense primes and their counsel agreeing to slow, limit, test or withhold a model because release could create a catastrophic security risk.

The carveout is narrow on paper. Covered risks include facilitation of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or offensive cyber weapons, degradation of critical infrastructure, autonomous improvement that could lead to those harms, loss of shut-down ability and unauthorized access to components such as model weights. The amendment would allow coordination to reduce those risks by delaying or otherwise limiting release, deployment, use, development, training, testing or evaluation of AI, but only after prior written notice to the Attorney General and Federal Trade Commission identifying the specific risk and scope of the proposed restriction.

The notice requirement is the legal hinge. As drafted, failure to disclose the coordination forfeits the exemption and leaves the firms with ordinary Sherman Act and Federal Trade Commission Act exposure. That structure gives executives a potential path to cooperate on model-release decisions that would otherwise make antitrust counsel sweat. It also leaves the most important procedural question unanswered: whether the Attorney General and Federal Trade Commission can stop a coordinated delay, demand changes, or merely receive the notice before the exemption attaches.

Nothing changes Monday. The amendment signals Congress is starting to treat frontier AI containment as a national-security function, but it is still a proposed NDAA amendment. For defense-industrial-base companies and AI vendors, the practical work is internal: decide who can authorize competitor coordination, require counsel to control those communications, and make the security-risk record specific enough to survive a later antitrust fight.