President Donald Trump signed an executive order limiting states’ regulation of artificial intelligence after months of wrangling.
Republican senators led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) tried to include a provision in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act that would prevent states from regulating AI, but the effort failed after last-minute hesitation from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). Months later, Trump implemented the effort with an executive order, signing it in the Oval Office, surrounded by its proponents.
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“We have a big signing right now, and we have a tremendous industry, where we’re leading by a lot. It’s the AI, artificial intelligence. I always thought it should be ‘SI,’ supreme intelligence, but I guess somewhere along the line, they decided on the word ‘artificial,’ and that’s OK with me. That’s up to them. It’s a massive industry,” Trump told reporters in opening the ceremony.
The president boasted that the United States was leading in the industry, amounting to “trillions of dollars,” but to maintain the lead, the U.S. had to have a “central source of approval.”
“When they need approvals or things, have to come to one source. They can’t go to California, New York, and various other places like Illinois,” Trump said, then got sidetracked by his dislike of Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL).
Trump outlined his logic for signing the order to ban state regulation, comparing the U.S.’s process of approval to China, where the process is much more centralized. If states were allowed to regulate AI, he argued, it would lead to a regulatory nightmare that would cripple innovation.
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“China has a central source of approval. I don’t think they have any approval. They just go and build, but people want to be in the United States. … But if they had to get 50 different approvals from 50 different states, you could forget it because it’s not possible to do, especially if you have some hostile — all you need is one hostile actor and you wouldn’t be able to do it,” he said. “So it doesn’t make sense. I didn’t have to be briefed on this, by the way. This is real easy business, and this is simple.”
After asking for words from some others present, the president once again voiced admiration for China‘s autocratic system, arguing the U.S. had to be unified to pose credible opposition.
“We have to be unified. China is unified because they have one vote. That’s President Xi. He’s just doing it, and that’s the end of that. You know, we have a different system, but we have a system that’s good, but we only have a system that’s good if it’s smart,” he said.
Trump also assured those skeptical that measures would be taken on the federal level to protect child safety.
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Trump went more into detail in the order itself, bashing former President Joe Biden for allegedly trying to “paralyze” the AI industry. He listed more reasons for opposing state-by-state regulation of AI, saying companies must be “free to innovate without cumbersome regulation.”
“First, State-by-State regulation by definition creates a patchwork of 50 different regulatory regimes that makes compliance more challenging, particularly for start-ups. Second, State laws are increasingly responsible for requiring entities to embed ideological bias within models. For example, a new Colorado law banning ‘algorithmic discrimination’ may even force AI models to produce false results in order to avoid a ‘differential treatment or impact’ on protected groups,” Trump wrote.
