ATR Backs Senate Commerce’s A.I. Moratorium

Americans for Tax Reform supports the Senate Commerce Committee’s federal preemption of state and local AI regulation included in the committee’s portion of the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act, which the Senate hopes to clear by the Fourth of July.

Like the House version before it, this proposal makes great strides for innovation and growth in AI policy.

Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform, issued the following statement on X in support of the Senate Commerce Committee’s moratorium on AI regulation:

Americans for Tax Reform urges the Senate to support the Commerce Committee’s AI moratorium.

This ten-year state A.I. moratorium will bring an end to the era of patchwork regulation on a state-by-state basis. Artificial Intelligence spans state lines and regulation must come from the federal government. Allowing some states to run wild with overregulation will kill American companies’ ability to compete and innovate. Unless the United States wants to fall behind, our country needs this moratorium. Thanks to the hard work of Senator Cruz and the Senate Commerce Committee, we can keep American companies ahead and push the frontier of Artificial Intelligence. 

As ATR has argued to the Trump administration and to the public, this policy is necessary to ensure innovation and human flourishing. Thousands of proposals have been introduced in state legislatures across the country to regulate or discourage the development of AI; even if they are not totally egregious, it is impossible for deployers to comply with a patchwork of 50 state laws. AI is plainly interstate commerce, and Congress should preempt its regulation like they did internet taxes through the Internet Tax Freedom Act. 

The Senate Commerce Committee should be commended for their work to build on the House draft by threading the budgetary needle on AI preemption. The Senate Commerce Committee has done great work to draft pro-innovation policy that will benefit future generations of Americans.

Senate Parliamentarian Allows for A.I. Moratorium to Stay in One Big Beautiful Bill

The Senate Parliamentarian ruled this weekend that the state A.I. moratorium in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will qualify for passage through budget reconciliation.

The Parliamentarian’s guidance will mean that the moratorium is not subject to the 60-vote threshold and can be passed by a simple majority in the Senate. This is the largest hurdle the provision faced and is a huge win for A.I. innovation and advocates of deregulation.

While the House-passed OBBBA attached AI preemption to a $500 million appropriation to modernize government systems with AI, it was unlikely to survive the Byrd Bath. This would disqualify the provision from budget reconciliation and so it was altered in the Senate Commerce Committee’s draft of the bill released on June 5^th. Chairman Cruz rewrote the A.I. moratorium so that the budgetary impact of the provision was far more substantial.

In the Senate version, access to Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) is conditional on states’ compliance with the state A.I. moratorium. The BEAD program expands access to high-speed internet across the United States. Tying the moratorium to BEAD establishes a clear budgetary impact from the state moratorium.