Trump Orders Government To Fight State Ai Laws

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday meant to override state regulations on artificial intelligence.

The order is intended to boost the AI industry, which has been eager for a national law rolling back state regulations governing the fast-moving technology.

That idea has crashed against political roadblocks in Congress: Two previous efforts this year collapsed, in part because of intra-GOP opposition. The executive order is designed in part to circumvent this process by bringing the power of the federal government to challenge state laws — an aggressive approach that even some supporters worry could turn out to be legally fragile.

Trump signed the order alongside Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, White House AI czar David Sacks, senior AI policy advisor Sriram Krishnan, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and others.

The full text has not been released, but a draft version of the executive order that leaked in November tasked several federal agencies with stamping out state AI regulations. It would have launched a litigation task force run by the Justice Department to coordinate with administration officials, such as crypto and AI czar David Sacks, and decide which state AI laws are worth challenging. The order also would have empowered Lutnick to restrict federal broadband funds to states with “onerous” AI laws.

The initial executive order was shelved as House leadership made a last-minute push to tack AI preemption language onto the year-end defense policy package. That effort collapsed at the beginning of December, following another failed attempt by Cruz this summer to have a 10-year freeze on all state and local AI laws ride onto President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.

The draft document also directed government lawyers to challenge state laws on the grounds that federal regulations preempt them and that the states are unconstitutionally regulating interstate commerce.

States and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle tried to dissuade Trump from issuing the order, with some questioning its legality. Some legal experts surmised that no state laws have so far run afoul of the Constitution’s commerce clause — the bedrock of the draft order — which the White House proposed tapping to zero out state AI laws it claims unlawfully regulate interstate commerce.

The GOP’s plan to inject AI preemption language into the NDAA involved merging an AI moratorium with new rules to protect children online, including a version of the Kids Online Safety Act that ditched language requiring platforms to take steps to prevent harms to young users.

Many in the tech industry favor a single federal AI standard over a patchwork of state AI laws they find increasingly burdensome. Now, kids' safety advocates are divided on whether trading away state AI rules for online protections for children is something they can live with. Industry is also split on whether carve-outs for kids’ safety laws could be more onerous than state AI laws.