Leaders in the nation’s massive tech industry claim they have been gut-punched by a late-night action in the U.S. Senate regarding the continued regulation of artificial intelligence.
In a sweeping vote that was a part of the deliberations surrounding President Trump’s One Big, Beautiful Bill, lawmakers overwhelmingly came down on the side of removing a moratorium on the regulation of AI at the state level.
The moratorium was proposed to be in place for 10 years and has been seen as almost a harbinger of where the country is going with ongoing AI regulation. Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz has been among the most vocal in favor of the moratorium, arguing that the nation’s tech industry needs to be freed from the burden of what could be a mosaic of differing state laws.
In an interview with the publication Business Insider, Cruz remarked that he was “very supportive of the principle” that AI should primarily be regulated at the national level.
At a meeting of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in May, Sam Altman, chief executive officer of OpenAI, said that if the matter were up to him, he would prefer “one federal framework, that is light touch, that we can understand, and that lets us move with the speed that this moment calls for.”
The push for what some regard as a free-for-all state approach to AI regulation reflects an assumption that many Democrat and Republican lawmakers don’t really believe that “AI will be a sufficiently important technology that will need to be regulated the way telephones, electrical transmission, the internet, and other major technological breakthroughs have always been by state and local governments,” observes the publication Vox.
The vote to allow for continued state AI regulation crossed party lines with Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn contending that it has been the states, not the federal government, that has tackled what everyone would agree is a problematic issue.
“They are the ones that are protecting our children in the virtual space,” said Blackburn, adding that AI regulation efforts on the state level have also advanced the protection of authors, broadcasters, entertainers, and podcasters.
In the days leading up to the Senate AI vote, a bipartisan group of more than two hundred state lawmakers argued against the moratorium. Similarly, 40 state attorneys general, also from both parties, warned that the impact of a moratorium “would be sweeping and wholly destructive of reasonable state efforts to prevent known harms associated with AI.”
July 3, 2025
By Garry Boulard
Image courtesy Unsplash
