The Senate voted 99-1 on Tuesday to remove the proposed suspension from the budget bill on states that will implement their own artificial intelligence laws.
The passage of the amendment has been widely welcomed by state legislatures and advocacy groups, and over the past few years, it has drafted hundreds of bills seeking to mitigate the myriad harmful effects of AI in the areas of privacy, healthcare, elections, education and the workforce.
Eric Null, co-director of the Privacy and Data Project at the Washington Think Tank Center for Democracy Technology, called the overwhelming vote a “big victory.”
“We didn’t want Congress to decide what the state could do in terms of protecting its members from the harm that arises from the AI systems. I think that was a pretty big problem for the state,” Null said.
The amendment was passed by a small Senate Republican cohort led by Texas Rep. Ted Cruz, who chairs the Commerce Committee, despite sustained efforts in recent weeks. Cruise argues that by allowing states to continue regulating AI in their own way, it hinders market growth.
Daniel Castro, director of the Data Innovation Center, a division of the Washington Think Tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, was one of those disappointed by Tuesday’s vote.
“The US is involved in a global race with countries like China, pursuing a coordinated national strategy to control AI,” Castro said in an email. “In order for America to compete and win, it must leverage talent, data and innovation. It’s not about binding AI companies with a patchwork of conflicting state regulations.”
Moratorium’s removal has followed numerous revisions in recent weeks. This is aimed at Cruz’s commitment to making compliance what it takes to receive funding from its $42 billion broadband equity, access and deployment program. When the senator asked Cruz to rewrite the language last week, he did so, hanging instead before the state accessed $500 million in new commerce funds.
When that version failed to gain traction, Cruz went on weekends with Senator Marsha Blackburn and R-Tenn. I started negotiating with and saved the pause, but reduced it. They appear to be trapped in a version that reduces the original 10-year ban on state enforcement to five years, including laws that protect children online and laws designed to protect individuals’ names, images and likenesses.
However, Blackburn fully elicited her support on Monday, indicating a growing skepticism within the GOP. When asked by Politico, Blackburn did not explain why this deal fell apart. This left her only official statement referring to the need to protect the public from potential AI abuse.
“I am grateful for President Cruz’s efforts to find acceptable languages that allow the nation to protect its citizens from AI abuse, but the current language is not acceptable to those who need these protections the most,” Blackburn said in a statement Tuesday. “This provision could allow Big Tech to continue using children, creators and conservatives. Congress cannot prevent states from enacting laws that protect their citizens until they pass federal preemptive laws, such as the Children’s Online Safety Act and the Online Privacy Framework.”
Commerce Sec. Howard Lutnick posted last week on X that eliminating state AI laws is a national security issue. This is “what we need to go ahead of our enemies and to keep America at the forefront of AI.”
“By creating a single national standard for AI, the bill will end the upset of 50 different state laws and ensure that American companies can develop cutting-edge technologies for our military, infrastructure and critical industries.
Cruz’s Moratorium was sold as a necessary step to clear the path to AI frameworks across the country, but none have been created. Null said he might support a version of a moratorium that lined up federal frameworks to replace state efforts for the Center for Democracy Technology, but it was “completely unreasonable” to eliminate all governance with the promise of future legislative action alone.
“There was a good, substantial federal standard with stakeholder involvement and if they went through a similar process that the privacy bill had done, it could have probably had a role to preempt what some states were doing,” Null said. “But without it, I think we’d kneel in the state to protect our components from the harm of AI. I think that would have been inappropriate.”
Meredith Ward, deputy director of the National Highest Intelligence Agency, called the vote “a huge victory for the states and citizens they serve.”
“This provision would have adversely affected CIOS efforts to provide services to CIOS citizens and ensure responsible data protection,” she wrote in an emailed statement. “NASCIO would like to thank the coalition of organizations and advocacy groups that opposed this language.”
The pushback to the moratorium came just after it was proposed last May. A group of more than 260 state lawmakers representing 50 states last month claimed that the language has now removed key guardrails that protect the public from AI disadvantages ranging from deep fraud to algorithmic identification. In another letter, a group of 40 state attorney generals called the proposal “irresponsible” and “total destroy any reasonable national efforts to prevent known harm related to AI.”
But despite the proposal’s slide into unpopularity — (North Carolina moderate Republican Sen. Tom Tillis, the only hustling Tuesday’s vote, opposed to deep cuts to Medicaid in the budget and announced he would not seek re-election over the weekend) — Null said the nation should not only be free, but also look at Ayi’s potential, but also be wary.
“I think the state should pay attention to what the legislature is doing, at least in this regard,” Null said.
