WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of six senators introduced legislation Wednesday that would require frontier artificial intelligence developers and hyperscale data center operators to report training-run compute, electricity draw and water use to a new federal registry, an effort the bill’s backers framed as the practical successor to the moratorium that collapsed in the House two weeks ago.

The AI Transparency and Grid Impact Act, unveiled at a midmorning press conference outside the Russell Senate Office Building, drops the production pause that defined the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez measure and replaces it with quarterly mandatory filings, a tiered penalty structure for non-disclosure, and a federal pre-emption clause designed to slow the patchwork of state-level moratoriums now advancing in California, New York and Washington state.

Lead sponsors include Sens. Maggie Hennessey, D-Colo., and Travis Beaumont, R-Ohio, joined by Sens. Lina Park, D-Wash., Ramon Delacruz, R-Ariz., Carla Mendenhall, I-Maine, and Wesley Ortiz, D-Pa. Aides described the group as a deliberate cross-section of energy-state and tech-state members assembled over the last ten days, after Democratic leadership concluded that no straight rerun of the moratorium would clear either chamber this Congress.

“The country is not going to pause and the country is not going to fly blind,” Hennessey said. “What this bill does is finally put numbers on the table — every quarter, in a format the public, the grid operators, and the regulators can actually use.”

Beaumont, who voted against the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez bill on April 7, said disclosure was “the floor, not the ceiling,” and argued the measure addressed the energy concerns that had given the moratorium its broadest appeal without “shutting the door on American compute.”

Under the draft text reviewed by reporters, any developer training a model above 5 x 10^25 floating-point operations — a threshold roughly aligned with the Commerce Department’s existing reporting rule but enforceable by statute — would file a pre-training notice within seven days of run initiation and a post-training filing within thirty days of completion. Data center operators above 50 megawatts of contracted load would file site-by-site energy and water use quarterly, with line-item breakdowns for behind-the-meter generation, diesel backup hours, and any cost-shifting to residential ratepayers.

The bill assigns oversight jointly to the Department of Energy and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, with audit authority routed through the Government Accountability Office. Penalties scale with company size and start at $250,000 per missed filing, rising to 1 percent of U.S. revenue for repeated willful violations.

The pre-emption clause has already drawn pushback. As drafted, it would block states from enacting permit pauses for facilities that comply with the federal disclosure regime, though it preserves state authority over siting, water rights and ratepayer protection. California state Sen. Marisol Quintanar, who is shepherding her own moratorium bill through the legislature in Sacramento, called the federal pre-emption language “a deal-breaker as written” in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

“Disclosure without the ability to act on what’s disclosed is a press release, not a policy,” Quintanar said.

Industry response was guarded but warmer than to any previous federal proposal. The Computer and Communications Industry Association issued a statement calling the bill “a serious framework that the industry can engage with,” while declining to endorse the measure. TechCoalition West, the trade group whose lobbying helped sink the moratorium, said in a brief release that it was “reviewing the text” but appreciated “the sponsors’ recognition that pause is not policy.”

A senior executive at a top-three cloud provider, granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, said the company’s policy team was likely to support the disclosure regime if the pre-emption language survived markup. “If we file the numbers and the states can’t stop the build, that is a deal we can live with,” the executive said. “The exposure here is the reverse — disclosure passes, pre-emption gets stripped, and we end up reporting to a federal registry and getting blocked in Sacramento anyway.”

That scenario is what Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s allies are now openly pursuing. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., told reporters on Capitol Hill that he was “open to a real disclosure regime” but would “not support a bill whose main effect is to block California from doing what California voters want.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., issued a sharper statement, calling the pre-emption clause “a giveaway dressed as a compromise.”

Hennessey, asked about the criticism, said sponsors expected pre-emption to be “the central fight” in committee and indicated the group had not yet whipped a position on a possible carve-out for state ratepayer-impact reviews.

Analysts said the bill’s prospects depended heavily on how the energy-cost message played in coming weeks. Domestic electricity prices have risen 4.1 percent year over year through April, with sharper spikes in PJM and ERCOT service territories where data center load growth has been most concentrated. The Energy Information Administration’s monthly outlook, released Tuesday, projected continued tightness through 2027.

“This bill is the version of AI policy that can pass a divided Congress, because it does not actually decide the hard question of whether to build,” said Priya Ramaswamy, a senior policy analyst at Energy Innovation Policy and Technology. “It punts that to data. The risk is that the data will simply confirm what grid operators are already saying, and Congress will be back here in eighteen months arguing about the same pause.”

The Senate Commerce and Energy committees are expected to share jurisdiction. A first hearing has been tentatively scheduled for May 19. Hennessey said sponsors hoped to clear committee before the Memorial Day recess and bring the bill to the floor in July, though aides acknowledged that timeline would slip if pre-emption could not be resolved.

The House companion, expected from Reps. Daniel Beresford, D-Wash., and Olivia Castellanos, R-Tex., is set to drop next week. House leadership has not yet committed floor time.