| A hotly contested, Republican-led bid to quash state AI regulations appears headed for a pivotal Senate vote after it cleared a major hurdle this week, albeit in narrowed form. The provision, which is part of President Donald Trump’s big tax and spending bill, would require states to freeze all regulations on artificial intelligence for the next decade or forgo certain federal funding. That’s a change from the version that the House of Representatives passed last month, which would have unconditionally outlawed the enforcement of existing state AI regulations and banned the passage of new ones. The revised language, authored by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), survived a review by the Senate parliamentarian over the weekend, allowing it to remain in the broader bill, officially dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That surprised some insiders who had expected it to run afoul of a Senate rule meant to prevent lawmakers from slipping substantive policy changes into budget bills. The measure’s survival sets the stage for a showdown over the AI-law moratorium when the bill comes to a floor vote. The Republican leaders and tech industry trade groups backing the moratorium say it is needed to clear a tangle of state regulations that could hamper U.S. innovation in an industry they believe the country must dominate to retain its global leadership. “By creating a single national standard for AI, the bill ends the chaos of 50 different state laws and makes sure American companies can develop cutting-edge tech for our military, infrastructure, and critical industries — without interference from anti-innovation politicians,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posted on Wednesday. Critics of the moratorium counter that it would leave the U.S. AI industry an unregulated “wild west,” emboldening bad actors to develop deceptive, biased and potentially dangerous tools that hurt ordinary Americans and diminish trust in the technology. In addition to preventing new state regulations, they say it would roll back scores of laws already passed that deal with issues such as political deepfakes, face recognition and algorithmic discrimination. Leading Democrats, a few Republicans and numerous civil society groups oppose the moratorium. So do 260 state lawmakers hailing from all 50 states and evenly split between the two major parties, who signed a joint letter opposing it earlier this month, as the Tech Brief first reported. Forty state attorneys general have also come out against it. There’s debate as to whether Cruz’s revisions to the moratorium leave states with a real choice. Cruz, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, told the Tech Brief in an emailed statement that the revised provision is “very simple.” “As a condition of receiving a portion of a new $500 million federal investment to deploy AI, states that voluntarily seek these funds must agree to temporarily pause AI regulations and use the funding in a cost-efficient manner,” he said. “History has shown that this light-touch regulatory approach to new technologies has been incredibly successful in promoting American innovation and jobs.” But Sen. Maria Cantwell (Washington), the commerce committee’s ranking Democrat, said the provision is written in a way that would put states at risk of losing out on a much bigger pot of federal broadband funding if they don’t comply. “The newly released language by Chair Cruz continues to hold $42 billion in BEAD funding hostage, forcing states to choose between protecting consumers and expanding critical broadband infrastructure to rural communities,” Cantwell said in a statement. BEAD is short for the federal Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program, which aims to bring high-speed internet access to more Americans. At least two senators have said they plan to offer an amendment to strip the provision from the budget bill. One is Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Massachusetts), who shares Cantwell’s interpretation of the provision’s text. “The language forces states to make an impossible choice between receiving broadband funding or protecting their residents from harms related to AI,” he said in a statement. He may have a partner across the aisle in Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), a frequent critic of the technology industry, who has also called for an amendment on the moratorium. Hawley is one of a few Senate Republicans who have criticized the provision, along with Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee) and Ron Johnson (Wisconsin). Those Senate Republicans may pose the biggest remaining obstacle to the moratorium’s passage. Assuming the chamber’s Democrats all vote to remove the AI pause from the bill, they’d need four Republicans to join them in order for the amendment to pass. If the amendment fails and the Senate passes the bill, it will return to the House, where the AI moratorium could face a final challenge: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) said after voting for the bill that she would have opposed it if she had known about the AI provisions. The bill passed the House by a single vote. The tight margins have advocacy groups mounting fevered final efforts to persuade those still on the fence. The Consumer Technology Association, a trade group representing more than 1,200 tech companies, sent a letter on Tuesday to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) and Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) urging them to preserve the moratorium. “States can still act,” the letter said, “so long as they do so in technology-neutral ways. For example, they can regulate deceptive practices, discrimination, or safety risks without singling out AI systems.” On the other side, Americans for Responsible Innovation, a tech-focused advocacy group, has enlisted Republican state lawmakers to help it make a “states’ rights” case against the moratorium. Also in the fight is the Future of Life Institute, which made headlines in 2023 with an open letter signed by a constellation of AI luminaries that called for a pause on the development of cutting-AI models, citing “profound risks to society.” The pause never happened, and the policy conversation in Washington has focused more on outracing China in AI than reining it in. Now the group is running an ad in five states and Washington that criticizes the moratorium as a giveaway to Big Tech. That organization’s chief government affairs officer, former Thune aide Jason Van Beek, said the states are doing a much better job regulating AI than Congress has. “If this preemption becomes law, a nail salon in D.C. would have more rules to follow than the AI companies,” he said. | 
