President Donald Trump’s impending executive order limiting states’ power over artificial intelligence has sparked a rare revolt within his own coalition.
From Florida to Missouri, Republican lawmakers who have spent the past year crafting their own AI rules insist they will not resign even if President Trump attempts to override their laws by statute. The pushback was wide-ranging, with rare agreement between Republicans and Democrats that states should have some say in how AI is regulated within their borders.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, flatly called President Trump’s plan illegal. Democratic lawmakers, including California Rep. Ted Lieu and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, echoed the same warning. And legal scholars say the Constitution may contradict Trump’s claim that he can unilaterally impose what he wants to be a “one rulebook” on the nation’s AI field.
But even President Trump’s staunchest defenders are telling him to pump the brakes. On Wednesday’s episode of Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, the former adviser said the fallout from the order would be a “legal quagmire.”
“President Trump reiterated today that he will sign the AI EO because even if states file a million lawsuits, they cannot burden us,” Bannon said, predicting the order would face many challenges in federal court.
A six-page draft executive order titled “Eliminate State Law Interference with National AI Policy,” circulated last month, proposes creating a federal task force to challenge state AI laws and raises the possibility of withholding certain broadband funding from states whose AI regulations the administration deems burdensome or inconsistent with the national framework.
All 50 states and several territories have introduced AI legislation this year, and dozens of states have enacted substantive measures, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Future orders will directly target many of these laws.
Why Republican states are preparing for open showdown
Mr. DeSantis, who announced Florida’s AI Bill of Rights last week, vehemently declared that Mr. Trump does not have the legal authority to override the state’s law.
“Executive orders cannot and cannot preempt state legislative action,” DeSantis wrote in X, arguing that only Congress can do that.
Executive orders do not and cannot preempt state legislative action. In theory, Congress could preempt the states by legislation.
The problem is that Congress hasn’t proposed a consistent regulatory scheme and just wants to prevent states from doing anything for 10 years… https://t.co/owWauZxRLk
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) December 8, 2025
Democrats, meanwhile, have created a strange bedfellow of louder conservatives, raising concerns about respect for federalism. Lieu accused Trump of a “fake executive order,” and Klobuchar said the president’s approach “threatens to nullify” the only protections Americans have against deepfakes and AI-based fraud.
Resistance is not limited to lawmakers. OpenAI itself acknowledged in a 15-page memo to the White House in March that preempting state AI laws “would require legislation from Congress.” This admission gives challengers a clear rebuttal to President Trump’s legal basis and undermines the argument that the executive branch can impose national AI rules on its own.
Republican-run states also fear the order will strip them of the protections they are actively trying to build.
Florida’s proposal, announced Dec. 4, would create an “Artificial Intelligence Bill of Rights” that would give residents comprehensive protections around privacy, data use, parental monitoring, name and image rights, and more, along with limits on deepfakes, restrictions on Chinese AI tools, guardrails for how insurance companies and chatbots operate, and strict rules governing AI data centers. President Trump’s impending executive order threatens to invalidate these statutes in the first place.
Where do state authorities begin and end?
The conflict goes deeper than a pre-emptive strike and goes to the heart of federalism. A recent Bloomberg op-ed by Kevin Frazier of the University of Texas School of Law argues that state laws “end at the border” and that the Justice Department has an affirmative constitutional duty to intervene when states exercise their powers nationwide.
Frazier uses America’s early history to demonstrate the Founding Fathers’ obsession with preventing extraterritorial state power. Under the Articles of Confederation, states routinely attempted to enforce laws across their borders, and Congress was required to convene special courts to stop them. James Madison even proposed giving Congress a veto over all state laws before Thomas Jefferson curtailed them. Ultimately, the judiciary was the arbiter, but one guiding question was whether state law would involve people outside the state who disagreed.
Frazier argues that AI laws in states like California and New York do just that because AI companies cannot realistically train state-specific models. “Just as your battery goes from 100% to 1% while you’re busy scrolling through Instagram, many Americans aren’t aware of the trend of states like California regulating beyond their borders,” he wrote.
For Mr. Frazier, an executive order directing the Justice Department to crack down on state overreach is consistent with core constitutional principles insofar as it targets extraterritorial regulation. But he is equally clear that states retain the discretion to act as “laboratories of democracy” as long as the experiment affects their own populations. He said that because AI is national in nature, it faces localized regulatory experimentation.
Many of President Trump’s more populist allies, including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), have warned that the short-term benefits to U.S. industry are not worth the unintended consequences of preempting state AI regulations.
Hawley said in October that he firmly opposes any measures that would undermine the state’s protections for children who may be at risk of exploitation or deepfake pornography.
“I want to protect our children from all of this, and I want the state to be able to do that, too. You know what? I mean, I think it’s a terrible idea to say, ‘No, state, I can’t protect my children in my state,'” Hawley said.
Although Congress has failed to pass many of the ideas he advocated for regulating AI at the national level, Hawley’s concerns about child exploitation were partially addressed earlier this year by passing the Take It Down Act, which was championed by first lady Melania Trump. The bill would make it a crime to share intimate images or deepfakes without consent and require online platforms to implement expedited takedown procedures.
Political rebellion and policy vacuum collide
President Trump’s future orders come in the midst of a regulatory vacuum. Federal AI legislation is weak, and although Congress reintroduced the Artificial Intelligence Civil Rights Act, which previously failed to pass, nothing resembling a comprehensive federal framework has yet been finalized.
Meanwhile, states have already begun filling the space with rules governing hiring algorithms, transparency obligations, law enforcement tools, educational use, and public safety concerns.
That patchwork, Trump argues, could threaten America’s competitiveness through AI development against adversaries such as China.
President Trump pushes through national AI order despite Republican resistance
“At this point in the campaign, we’re ahead of everyone, but that won’t last long if 50 states (many of them bad actors) are involved in the rules and approval process,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday. “AI will be destroyed in its early stages.”
But his efforts to wipe out state regulation now face organized resistance from Republican governors, Make America Great Again officials, Democrats, constitutional scholars and even lawyers advising the AI industry.
