Republicans received approval from a key Senate officer to include a moratorium on state regulation of artificial intelligence in President Donald Trump’s tax and spending bill though opposition to the ban within the GOP could sink it anyway.
In a surprise decision, the Senate parliamentarian on Saturday said the ban passed muster under the so-called Byrd Rule, which governs what can be included in reconciliation legislation. The Senate is using reconciliation, an end run around the filibuster, to pass an enormous tax and spending package that, among other things, extends the tax cuts approved in 2017 during Trump’s first term.
The AI regulation moratorium would essentially deny states federal funding for broadband internet projects if they enforce local AI regulations.
It is opposed by local officials, including in some Republican-led states. They say AI needs guardrails because Congress doesn’t appear to be close to passing regulations at the federal level.
The Byrd Rule requires reconciliation bills only include budgetary matters, and the parliamentarian, who interprets the rules for the Senate, nixed other items like zeroing out funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and repealing some Environmental Protection Agency tailpipe-emissions rules.
White House officials have said that Trump is in favor of the moratorium. “The America First position should be to support a moderate and innovation-friendly regulatory regime at the federal level, which will help rather than hobble the U.S. in winning the AI race,” wrote venture capitalist and White House AI czar David Sacks in a post on X earlier this month.
There’s a good chance the AI ban doesn’t end up in the final bill in any case. Senators including Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) and Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) have loudly opposed the provision, with Hawley vowing to work with Democrats to strip it from the final bill. In the House, members of the Freedom Caucus have also voiced their opposition.
The AI ban can be stripped from the bill with a simple majority vote. That means four GOP defections in the Senate would kill the moratorium.
“My amendment to strip the AI moratorium from the reconciliation bill is ready to go. I urge other members to join me and block this dangerous provision,” wrote Sen. Ed Markey (D., Mass.) in a post on X.
The dispute lays bare a key tension in AI development—the speed of innovation versus human safety. When generative AI was still in the research phase before 2022, scientists tempered the pace of advancements with a focus on not stumbling into a scenario that leads to catastrophic events like providing instructions on planning a terrorist attack. Indeed, AI leader OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit organization to address this exact issue.
But competitive pressures have grown now that AI has reached the commercialization stage, and safety concerns are being de-emphasized in favor of speeding up advances. There is also a national security issue as the competition with Chinese AI labs heats up.
OpenAI is trying to become a fully for-profit entity in 2025, a sign of where things are.
In the absence of federal AI safety regulation, many states have begun the process on their own. But that would result in a patchwork quilt of regulations, none of which will be exactly the same, and it would create compliance nightmares for AI labs, especially smaller ones. This is in addition to fragmented international regulations.
“Compliance costs have become a huge financial burden for AI startups,” wrote Weiyue Wu and Shaoshan Liu in a 2023 Harvard Kennedy School paper. “Complex regulatory processes that vary across the globe give well-established technology firms an upper-hand.”
AI labs would prefer no regulation, but a single federal standard would be preferable to a hodgepodge of state laws.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Joe Light via MSN
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://www.technocracy.news and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.
