An executive order that could soon be signed by President Donald Trump would thwart states’ artificial intelligence laws by launching legal challenges and withholding federal funding, according to a draft of the order obtained. Makes sense.
The draft surfaced shortly after Trump publicly called for a single federal standard on AI “instead of a patchwork of 50 State Regulatory Regimes.” The draft order would give Attorney General Pam Bondi 30 days to establish an “AI Litigation Task Force” whose sole task is to challenge state AI laws.
Those challenges would be issued “on grounds that such laws unconstitutionally regulate interstate commerce, are preempted by existing Federal regulations, or are otherwise unlawful in the Attorney General’s judgment,” the draft says. The order also directs Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to notify states with contested AI laws that they are ineligible for funds under the federal Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program. BEAD is a more than $42 billion program that has allocated funding to all U.S. states and territories.
The order, which was first reported by The Information, is not yet finalized. A White House official told CNBC that any discussion around it is just speculation until it is officially announced. As written, the EO would be a major win for the burgeoning AI industry, whose leaders — including Sam Altman’s OpenAI, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and other Silicon Valley titans — oppose an inconsistent state-by-state policy approach.
It would be just as big a blow to state lawmakers across the country who have sought to pass bills that would place guardrails on the nascent technology. New York State Assemblymember Alex Bores, who co-sponsored a state AI safety bill, in a statement to CNBC called the draft EO “a blank check to Donald Trump’s tech billionaire backers who’ve already made a fortune on — and now stand to profit exponentially more from — allowing unconstrained AI to wipe out jobs, destroy our kids’ brains, and drive electricity bills through the roof.” Bores, a Democrat who is running for Congress, this week became the first target of a well-funded super PAC backed by AI industry leaders.