US Senate strikes AI regulation ban from Trump megabill

WASHINGTON: The Republican-led U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to remove a 10-year federal moratorium on state regulation of artificial intelligence from President Trump’s sweeping tax-cut and spending bill.

Lawmakers voted 99-1 to strike the ban from the bill by adopting an amendment offered by Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn. The action came during a marathon session known as a “vote-a-rama,” in which lawmakers offered numerous amendments to the legislation that Republicans eventually hope to pass.

Republican Senator Thom Tillis was the lone lawmaker who voted to retain the ban. The Senate later passed the tax bill on a 51-50 vote.

The Senate version of Trump’s legislation would have only restricted states regulating AI from tapping a new $500 million fund to support AI infrastructure.

Major AI companies, including Alphabet’s Google, and OpenAI, have expressed support for Congress taking AI regulation out of the hands of states to free innovation from a panoply of differing requirements.

Senator Maria Cantwell, the top Democrat on the Commerce Committee, praised the vote, saying “we can’t just run over good state consumer protection laws. States can fight robocalls, deepfakes and provide safe autonomous vehicle laws.”

A group of 17 Republican governors had urged Congress to abandon the moratorium.

“We will now be able to protect our kids from the harms of completely unregulated AI,” said Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Blackburn presented her amendment to strike the provision a day after agreeing to compromise language with Senate Commerce Committee chair Ted Cruz that would have cut the ban to five years and allowed states to regulate issues such as protecting artists’ voices or child online safety if they did not impose an “undue or disproportionate burden” on AI.

But Blackburn withdrew her support for the compromise before the amendment vote.

“Until Congress passes federally preemptive legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act and an online privacy framework, we can’t block states from making laws that protect their citizens,” the Tennessee Republican said.