H.R. 8094: AI Foundation Model Transparency Act of 2026

H.R. 8094, the AI Foundation Model Transparency Act of 2026, would create a federal disclosure regime for the most powerful AI models. The Federal Trade Commission would have one year after enactment to write the rules.

The rules would only hit the biggest players. A company is covered if its model trips one of four triggers: it performs at levels that could pose serious risks; it has more than 10 million monthly users; it has more than 10 million monthly downloads; or it was trained on more than 10^26 computing operations. The bill also sets a floor for what counts as a "foundation model" in the first place — broadly trained, general-purpose, and built with at least 1 billion parameters.

The heart of the bill is disclosure. Covered companies would post information on their own sites in a plain, consumer-friendly format, and feed a central FTC website in a machine-readable format. The required list is long: where the training data came from and whether your inputs are retained while you use the model; the data's demographic and language makeup; what the model is for and where it falls short; its version, release date, and knowledge cutoff; supported languages; how the company tracks and responds to bad incidents; and how it lines its model up against the NIST AI Risk Management Framework or its own safety guardrails.

The most sensitive part is test results. Companies would have to disclose how their models perform on high-stakes questions — medical and health advice, weapons (biological, chemical, radiological, nuclear), national security, cybersecurity, critical infrastructure, elections, law enforcement, loan and housing decisions, education, hiring, public services, and effects on vulnerable groups, specifically minors under 18 and seniors 65 and older.

There are off-ramps. Fully open-source models are exempt. A company building on someone else's base model can link to that model's disclosure, but still has to comply once it makes significant changes. Small businesses and firms under a year old get FTC templates, hands-on help from a technical representative, and a one-time three-month grace period before penalties apply. Enforcement runs through the FTC's existing authority over unfair or deceptive practices, but the agency must give a company at least 14 days' notice before acting. The rules kick in 90 days after they're finalized, and the FTC has to revisit them every year.