Why the AI moratorium’s defeat may signal a new political era

The “Big, Beautiful Bill” that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4 was chock full of controversial policies—Medicaid work requirements, increased funding for ICE, and an end to tax credits for clean energy and vehicles, to name just a few. But one highly contested provision was missing. Just days earlier, during a late-night voting session, the Senate had killed the bill’s 10-year moratorium on state-level AI regulation. 

“We really dodged a bullet,” says Scott Wiener, a California state senator and the author of SB 1047, a bill that would have made companies liable for harms caused by large AI models. It was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom last year, but Wiener is now working to pass SB 53, which establishes whistleblower protections for employees of AI companies. Had the federal AI regulation moratorium passed, he says, that bill likely would have been dead.

The moratorium could also have killed laws that have already been adopted around the country, including a Colorado law that targets algorithmic discrimination, laws in Utah and California aimed at making AI-generated content more identifiable, and other legislation focused on preserving data privacy and keeping children safe online. Proponents of the moratorium, such OpenAI and Senator Ted Cruz, have said that a “patchwork” of state-level regulations would place an undue burden on technology companies and stymie innovation. Federal regulation, they argue, is a better approach—but there is currently no federal AI regulation in place.

Wiener and other state lawmakers can now get back to work writing and passing AI policy, at least for the time being—with the tailwind of a major moral victory at their backs. The movement to defeat the moratorium was impressively bipartisan: 40 state attorneys general signed a letter to Congress opposing the measure, as did a group of over 250 Republican and Democratic state lawmakers. And while congressional Democrats were united against the moratorium, the final nail in its coffin was hammered in by Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, a Tea Party conservative and Trump ally who backed out of a compromise with Cruz at the eleventh hour.

The moratorium fight may have signaled a bigger political shift. “In the last few months, we’ve seen a much broader and more diverse coalition form in support of AI regulation generally,” says Amba Kak, co–executive director of the AI Now Institute. After years of relative inaction, politicians are getting concerned about the risks of unregulated artificial intelligence. 

Granted, there’s an argument to be made that the moratorium’s defeat was highly contingent. Blackburn appears to have been motivated almost entirely by concerns about children’s online safety and the rights of country musicians to control their own likenesses; state lawmakers, meanwhile, were affronted by the federal government’s attempt to defang legislation that they had already passed.

And even though powerful technology firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI reportedly lobbied in favor of the moratorium, continuing to push for it might not have been worth it to the Trump administration and its allies—at least not at the expense of tax breaks and entitlement cuts. Baobao Zhang, an associate professor of political science at Syracuse University, says that the administration may have been willing to give up on the moratorium in order to push through the rest of the bill by its self-imposed Independence Day deadline.

Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to a request for comment. OpenAI noted that the company was opposed to a state-by-state approach to AI regulation but did not respond to specific questions regarding the moratorium’s defeat. 

It’s almost certainly the case that the moratorium’s breadth, as well as its decade-long duration, helped opponents marshall a diverse coalition to their side. But that breadth isn’t incidental—it’s related to the very nature of AI. Blackburn, who represents country musicians in Nashville, and Wiener, who represents software developers in San Francisco, have a shared interest in AI regulation precisely because such a powerful and general-purpose tool has the potential to affect so many people’s well-being and livelihood. “There are real anxieties that are touching people of all classes,” Kak says. “It’s creating solidarities that maybe didn’t exist before.”

Faced with outspoken advocates, concerned constituents, and the constant buzz of AI discourse, politicians from both sides of the aisle are starting to argue for taking AI extremely seriously. One of the most prominent anti-moratorium voices was Marjorie Taylor Greene, who voted for the version of the bill containing the moratorium before admitting that she hadn’t read it thoroughly and committing to opposing the moratorium moving forward. “We have no idea what AI will be capable of in the next 10 years,” she posted last month.

And two weeks ago, Pete Buttigieg, President Biden’s transportation secretary, published a Substack post entitled “We Are Still Underreacting on AI.” “The terms of what it is like to be a human are about to change in ways that rival the transformations of the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution, only much more quickly,” he wrote.

Wiener has noticed a shift among his peers. “More and more policymakers understand that we can’t just ignore this,” he says. But awareness is several steps short of effective legislation, and regulation opponents aren’t giving up the fight. The Trump administration is reportedly working on a slate of executive actions aimed at making more energy available for AI training and deployment, and Cruz says he is planning to introduce his own anti-regulation bill.

Meanwhile, proponents of regulation will need to figure out how to channel the broad opposition to the moratorium into support for specific policies. It won’t be a simple task. “It’s easy for all of us to agree on what we don’t want,” Kak says. “The harder question is: What is it that we do want?”