Trump to issue executive order for single federal rule on AI regulation

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Donald Trump said he will this week sign an executive order to prevent US states from individually regulating artificial intelligence, in a move that is likely to inflame tensions within his own Maga coalition.

The administration has twice this year sought to pass legislation to regulate the technology at the federal level — a key demand of AI lobbyists — only to be thwarted by tech sceptics, including several Republican senators.

“I will be doing a ONE RULE Executive Order this week,” Trump said in a post on his social media site Truth Social on Monday morning.

“We are beating ALL COUNTRIES at this point in the race, but that won’t last long if we are going to have 50 states, many of them bad actors, involved in RULES and the APPROVAL PROCESS,” he added. 

Lobbyists backed by OpenAI co-founder and venture capital group Andreessen Horowitz have pushed for the measure, claiming that a patchwork of state rules would slow down AI’s development and prevent America from winning the technology race against China.

Trump’s AI tsar David Sacks has also warned that allowing states to individually regulate the technology would “hobble” the US artificial intelligence sector.

“You can’t expect a company to get 50 Approvals every time they want to do something,” Trump said in his Monday post. “THAT WILL NEVER WORK!”

However, Republican senators including Josh Hawley strongly opposed the move, as did governors Ron DeSantis and Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the president’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon.

Last week, a so-called pre-emption clause, which would force states to follow a single federal rule book for AI, was removed from a defence funding bill amid a backlash from members of Congress.

A draft executive order leaked last week suggested that the administration could threaten to withhold certain federal funds from states that pass AI rules with which it disagrees.

However, the order is likely to be swiftly challenged by the states.

“The executive branch is limited in what it can do,” said Mackenzie Arnold, director of US policy at LawAI, a think-tank. “Agencies can only pre-empt state law insofar as Congress has given them the power to, and in this case, neither the Federal Communications Commission nor the Federal Trade Commission has that power.”

“The EO is trying to address a question only Congress can,” he added.