Republican And Democratic States Defy Trump On Ai Regulation

State leaders across the country are defying Donald Trump’s hands-off approach to regulating artificial intelligence by pushing for stronger controls amid the uproar over the technology’s potential perils.

The coast-to-coast effort by Republicans and Democrats intensified this week after former employees of the nation’s largest AI companies warned that the technology holds such power, and is developing so rapidly, it could lead to the extinction of humanity. Company executives, including Trump ally Elon Musk of SpaceXAI, all called for a slowdown in the technology’s growth.

Trump in social media posts dismissed the alarms as a “HOAX,” arguing that new rules would hurt the economy and boost China. But some governors, state attorneys general and members of Congress say the threat is real — and they are willing to set guardrails on the technology amid the void left by the White House.

In California, the epicenter of AI development, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom told POLITICO Thursday he’s considering calling a special session of the state Legislature to pass new laws in the coming months. He said the move was driven by “the tendency of the Trump administration to do absolutely nothing.”

Florida, led by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, has been one of the loudest red states advocating for AI controls and has sued some of the industry’s biggest players, including OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. DeSantis’ handpicked attorney general said that new laws are needed to criminally charge AI companies if their chatbots are used in illegal acts.

“Florida's got to lead here,” Attorney General James Uthmeier said on Thursday.

Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, who has advanced artificial intelligence regulations in his state, wrote an open letter this week calling on Congress to pass AI safety laws and block the sale of high-end technology to China. But he also urged that federal rules “should set a national floor — not a ceiling.”

“States must retain full power to regulate consumer and child protection, guide workforce development, foster local AI adoption and innovate and advance the human-enhancing applications we want to accelerate,” Cox wrote.

Calls for more robust AI regulations have escalated since July, when OpenAI disclosed its AI programs went rogue during a training exercise to execute an autonomous cyberattack on Hugging Face, another tech company. The issue burst into the national consciousness last week when a 27-year-old Anthropic researcher resigned, warning on social media that high-level employees building AI models “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

In the wake of the disclosure, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Altman, Musk and other AI executives argued that the technology needs to slow down, with some proposals involving greater government regulation and safeguards.

The result has scrambled politics in D.C., with prominent Democrats urging action while Republicans have divided over how seriously to take the threats.

The president’s position, however, has been unambiguous.

He argued in social media posts that the administration has done enough to prevent risks of catastrophe and that efforts to curb AI’s growth were part of a “SICK conspiracy” to benefit China in the race to develop the technology.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades,” Trump posted Monday.

The president's former AI czar, David Sacks, this week reiterated that Trump wants the federal government, not individual states, to be the driving force in deciding limits on artificial technology.

"We should have one rulebook with respect to AI, because having, I'd say, a sensible federal framework is better than a patchwork of 50 different states running in 50 different directions," Sacks said at POLITICO’s Decoded Summit in Washington.

He also pushed back against claims the Trump administration doesn't favor any regulation, saying that in March it put forth a set of "principles for a federal framework."

In a statement to POLITICO, a White House official said the administration is “committed to implementing a comprehensive AI framework,” arguing that its approach would protect children, intellectual property and communities while maintaining U.S. leadership in AI.

The official also warned that “conflicting state laws” would undermine American innovation and said, “the most restrictive States should not dictate national AI policy.”

Red and blue states, however, have signaled they’re not keen to wait for the Trump administration to follow through.

In Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro on Thursday called for stricter limits on AI during a conference in Pittsburgh, saying that the Pennsylvania Department of State has investigated chatbots that could endanger children.

"Leaders in our federal government refuse to put in place any guardrails to ensure this technology is used responsibly, whether out of willful ignorance or whether out of personal greed,” said Shapiro, who like Newsom is a potential 2028 presidential hopeful.

Newsom’s call for action follows his signature last year on a first-in-the-nation AI transparency and incident reporting law that set off a cross-country tour of copycat lawmaking in states like New York and Illinois. Last week, Newsom signed two AI safety bills to regulate the kind of third-party safety checks OpenAI and Anthropic now are pushing.

But the new laws came after the governor fought off more aggressive attempts by California lawmakers to rein in the technology, including requirements that companies have the capability to shut down some autonomous AI programs in the event they behave unpredictably. The idea resurfaced in the wake of the Hugging Face debacle and subsequent revelations about similar AI cyberattacks, when AI safety advocates rekindled debate over the need for the “kill switch” failsafes. Newsom has sought to protect and foster AI development as a vital industry powering Silicon Valley, one he has consistently championed as an economic engine.

The governor told POLITICO Thursday that the legislation he’s signed provides only a baseline for regulations that should be updated as the technology develops. Aside from a special legislative session, Newsom, who will leave office at the beginning of next year due to term limits, said he was considering additional executive action or steps by state agencies under their existing authority.

Sunshine State officials are walking a similar tightrope in attempting to balance AI safeguards without restricting its development — with the added concern of stepping on the president’s toes in his home state. To that end, the Trump administration factored heavily in the Florida House’s decision to reject a slate of AI regulations DeSantis sought to advance this year.

Yet DeSantis and Uthmeier are still charging hard. Uthmeier sued OpenAI and Altman in June, a landmark legal challenge, claiming the company is failing to protect users from potential harms. OpenAI is fighting Florida’s lawsuit and defends its user protection policies. Uthmeier has also sued the streaming giant Netflix and TikTok.

Uthmeier, who is up for election in November, said this month he wants Florida lawmakers to pass legislation allowing his office to criminally charge companies for illegal acts carried out with the use of their chatbots, such as creating child sexual abuse materials. The change would allow Florida to treat tech companies “like a co-defendant in a homicide,” Uthmeier said.

One of three state attorneys general endorsed by Trump, Uthmeier, agreed with the White House that “we have to beat China” on AI advancement or “we are toast.” He said he’d prefer that Congress pass AI safety legislation.

“But in the absence of that,” he continued, “we can't just stand around and watch our kids be advised on how to commit suicide and hurt themselves. We can't stand by and watch ChatGPT advise two school murderers,” referencing recent killings at state universities alleged to have been aided by chatbots.

New York’s AI safety law, which was modeled on California’s, does not take effect until January. But Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul said this week she already was looking to find “additional actions that we can take at the state level to lead the way in the absence of leadership from Washington.” She did not specify what that might look like.

“I believe we have an obligation to ensure that technological progress does not come at our own peril,” Hochul said after a Tuesday event in New York City.

The flurry around AI safety builds on a national debate over data centers, which power the technology. Amid fears of AI risks, pollution and electricity costs, intense blowback to data center construction has factored into numerous high-profile U.S. Senate, congressional and gubernatorial campaigns ahead of the midterms. The debate also has no clear partisan lines with Democrats and Republicans hammering each other over supposed support for data centers.

Once again, though, the president’s stance is explicit. He called Jensen Huang, chief executive of AI-chip company Nvidia, while Huang was on stage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles Monday afternoon to extol the benefits of data centers and ridicule naysayers.

“The data centers are great, and they make people wealthy, and they make states wealthy, and it’s the oil for the next 20-25 years, bigger than the internet. And AI, much more so,” the president said.

Jalen Beckford contributed to this report.