The US president demanded one federal standard rather than what he called a “patchwork of 50 State Regulatory Regimes”. A White House source told the FT officials were weighing an executive order that would cut off federal funds to any state that dared to write its own AI rules.
Silicon Valley lobbyists have been begging for this sort of centralised framework for months because they would only have to "lobby" one set of politicians. Trump’s timing looked awkward because Build American AI, a group backed by venture capital outfit Andreessen Horowitz and an OpenAI co-founder, set up shop in Washington only two weeks earlier to fight state regulation. Its leader, Nathan Leamer, wandered into the White House hours before Trump publicly backed the move, which only made the muttering on Capitol Hill louder.
Some MAGA voices are already sore about Trump’s handling of the affordability crunch and chatter about his links to Jeffrey Epstein, so this row hardly helped. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called the plan “an insult to voters”. They claimed it would stop states shielding people from “online censorship of political speech, predatory applications that target children, violations of intellectual property rights and data centre intrusions on power/water resources”.
Big Tech pressure, the efforts of Trump’s AI tsar David Sacks, and a $100 million fund for pro-AI candidates revived the proposal all the same. A tech official close to the talks said they expected the new version to meet less resistance because it might include child protection clauses and mental health safeguards.
Plenty of senior Republicans bristled. Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders warned “now isn’t the time to backtrack” and urged the White House to “drop the pre-emption plan now and protect our kids and communities”.
Conservative lawyer Mike Davis argued the industry wanted a “licence to steal and profit from copyright owners across America and said the idea would harm conservatives, children, communities and creators.”
A person close to party leaders said some Republicans fretted that Trump’s soft-touch AI stance could wallop them at the ballot box. Concerns about job losses, rising energy bills and child safety kept bubbling away. A YouGov poll for the Institute for Family Studies in June found only 18 per cent of voters backed stopping states from regulating AI. Pew Research later found that half of Americans feared that the technology would damage their relationships.
Michael Toscano of the Institute for Family Studies said of the plan that “it’s hard to understand how, in any conceivable way, this is beneficial for the Republican party”.