On July 6, Gov. JB Pritzker signed the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act, which passed with overwhelming legislative support in the General Assembly. Anthropic backed it. So did OpenAI. The companies being regulated stood alongside the legislators regulating them, which is rare enough to be worth pausing over. California and New York had already required the largest AI developers to publish safety frameworks and report serious incidents. Illinois added the thing neither had: Beginning in 2028, those companies must submit to an annual independent audit. Every year, an outside party must examine whether the company actually did what its safety plan said, and sign its name to the answer. This is the first time any American government has required that an AI company’s safety claims be checked by someone other than the AI company. Illinois deserves the credit it is receiving. Now the question the statute has left unanswered: Who performs these audits? The law says the third-party auditor must work consistent with generally accepted auditing standards and must have demonstrated com