After grinding through the House, Donald Trump’s big beautiful reconciliation bill is now pending in the Senate, where weary Republicans and even wearier Democrats probe and ponder. As committees prepare to mark up the package this week, a particularly egregious and unprecedented carve-out for artificial intelligence has bubbled to the surface. Tucked into the House-approved legislation is a ten-year moratorium on state regulation of AI.
This could be wielded to prevent regulation of anything involving an algorithm or machine learning, from AI-generated deepfakes to strategies to set personalized prices based on extracted data. More than 30 states adopted AI-based legislation or resolutions last year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
While the Trump administration has engaged in wide-scale deregulation by demolishing federal agencies and purging employees, a preemptive blockade that not only restricts regulation but wipes current laws off the books strikes a new chord.
But the provision has run into trouble, not because of its dubious budgetary impact but because some Republicans are backing up their states’ ability to protect their populations. “I’ll try to do everything I can to kill that,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) told NOTUS last month. At a hearing on the NO FAKES Act, a deepfake regulation bill, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) backed up Hawley, pointing to the successful state regulations in her state, a hotbed of the...
Since emerging as the country’s nominated top health official in January, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spread 12 provably false health claims in government hearings, media appearances, and on social ...