Hours before a House Ways and Means Committee markup that will decide the immediate fate of the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez artificial-intelligence moratorium, the largest U.S. cloud operators on Tuesday offered Congress a voluntary alternative they described as a “good-faith substitute” — a tiered compute-disclosure regime, a 12-month federal grid-impact reporting framework and a binding industry pledge to slow new training-campus permitting in the most strained electricity markets through the end of the year.

The proposal, circulated to committee members early Tuesday and posted publicly by midday on the Computing Infrastructure Council’s website, marks the most concrete concession from the hyperscaler bloc since the Algorithmic Energy and Labor Protection Act cleared the Senate on April 7. Industry executives have privately resisted any framework that triggers federal review of frontier training runs, and Tuesday’s offer is widely read on Capitol Hill as a signal that the lobbying calculus has shifted in the final 48 hours.

“You don’t put a public concession on the table the night before a markup unless your private vote count tells you something has moved,” said Sasha Ohrenstein, a former House Energy and Commerce counsel now in private practice. “They are either trying to peel off two moderate Democrats, or they are trying to give Chairwoman DelBene a place to land if she wants to amend rather than report the bill as passed by the Senate.”

The Computing Infrastructure Council’s framework, branded the “Responsible Compute and Grid Transparency Pledge,” would require participating companies to file confidential quarterly reports with the Department of Energy on compute capacity at sites above 200 megawatts of peak demand, disclose grid-interconnection requests above a defined threshold, and accept a yearlong moratorium on new permit filings in the four U.S. regional grids the proposal labels “high-stress” — the Texas ERCOT footprint, parts of the PJM Mid-Atlantic interconnection, the upper Midwest’s MISO zone and portions of California’s CAISO. The pledge does not constrain training-run size, contains no penalties beyond expulsion from the trade association, and applies only to signatories.

A spokesperson for Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who co-sponsored the underlying bill with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., dismissed the offer within hours. “A voluntary pledge written by the companies the bill is meant to constrain is not a compromise, it is a press release,” the spokesperson, Aida Trujillo, said. “If the council were serious, they would support the disclosure provisions already in the Senate-passed text and negotiate the threshold.” Sanders’ office issued a similar statement.

The witness list for Wednesday’s 10 a.m. markup, released by majority committee staff late Monday and updated Tuesday morning, runs to nine names. Four are academic or think-tank economists focused on grid reliability, ratepayer cost-shifting and the energy intensity of frontier model training, including Dr. Anita Boruah of MIT’s Energy Initiative, Renata Olszewski of the State Energy Policy Project at the University at Albany, and Dr. Marcus Field, a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute who has co-authored two papers cited by Sanders staff during drafting. Two are labor researchers, including a representative of the AFL-CIO Technology Institute and a community-college workforce analyst from central Ohio. The remaining three are industry-aligned: a senior policy executive from the Computing Infrastructure Council, an associate dean of computer science from a public research university, and an attorney representing a coalition of small AI developers concerned that the bill’s compute threshold could inadvertently capture mid-tier startups.

The roster, two committee aides said, was designed to ensure that grid and labor arguments dominate the opening hours of the markup, with industry rebuttal concentrated in the second panel. The aides, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal scheduling, said Chairwoman Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., had personally signed off on the balance after a Monday-evening caucus meeting in which moderate Democrats from data-center districts pressed for at least two industry witnesses.

DelBene’s office declined to characterize the vote count Tuesday, but a spokesperson said the chairwoman “continues to believe the underlying objectives of the bill are valid and that the question before the committee is how to legislate against the energy and labor concerns without conceding ground in international competition.” Industry whip counts circulated overnight continue to put the panel at 24 likely no votes and 21 likely yes, with two members described as “soft no” and one as “movable yes.”

Equity markets paid close attention. Shares of the three largest publicly traded U.S. cloud operators were modestly higher in Tuesday trading, with the Nasdaq Composite up 0.6 percent by early afternoon. Several sell-side analysts who track the data-center sector revised their probability estimates for the bill reaching the president’s desk in its current form. Morgan Stanley’s policy desk, in a note circulated Tuesday morning, moved its estimate from 24 percent to 19 percent. Citi’s John Reilly, in a note Monday evening, kept his estimate at 30 percent but flagged the council’s pledge as a “tell” that industry lobbyists are no longer confident in a straight-up no vote.

“The base case is still that the bill either dies in committee or is amended to a softer disclosure framework before it reaches the floor,” Reilly wrote. “But the probability of a partial yes — a compromise version that still contains binding reporting and a narrower compute threshold — has gone up materially in the last week.”

The White House remained publicly noncommittal. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, asked about the council’s proposal at Tuesday’s briefing, said the administration “welcomes constructive industry engagement” and would review any compromise text that emerges. Two senior administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the president would prefer the bill be reshaped in committee rather than vetoed on his desk, a position consistent with comments the White House has made for two weeks.

Outside the Capitol on Tuesday afternoon, a coalition of about 200 demonstrators organized by the Sierra Club and the Communications Workers of America rallied in support of the moratorium, holding signs that read “Pause the Build” and “Grid Before Models.” Across First Street, a smaller counter-rally organized by a recently formed group called Workers for American Compute carried signs emphasizing data-center construction jobs in Texas and Ohio. Capitol Police reported no incidents.

Committee aides said an amendment list is expected by 8 a.m. Wednesday and that additional procedural votes would be scheduled depending on how the opening witness panels run.