Big Tech’s desperate last push at AI regulation | The Verge

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With midterms looming, the White House is proposing a shotgun marriage between child safety and AI boosters

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U. S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) arrive for a news conference with bipartisan senators on passage of the Online Privacy Protection Act at the Capitol on July 30, 2024 in Washington, DC.

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For months, Big Tech’s Washington lobbyists have chased after the holy grail of pro-AI legislation: preemption. This would be a comprehensive federal law, passed in Congress and signed by the president, applying one set of AI rules across the entire country and overriding the legally messy state-by-state approach to regulation. For months, lobbyists have run into roadblocks and incurred nationwide political blowback, and they now face the possibility that after the midterms, Congress will flip to hostile Democrats unwilling to work with them.

But their final, most desperate attempt at preemption is coming with new baggage, related to an entirely different fight in Congress that predates the public launch of Chat GPT: child safety.

Earlier this week, reports leaked that the White House had told child safety groups and Big Tech companies that it would endorse a slate of children’s online safety laws backed by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), the coauthor of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), as part of an overall preemption package. While the issue of online safety does meaningfully overlap with AI, it’s only one facet of a much larger, complex set of issues that would need to be addressed in a truly comprehensive law: frontier model safety, discrimination, environmental impact, and so forth.

Regardless, the potential deal has hit one snag: The White House had apparently not informed House Republicans, which had just passed their own version of KOSA, that it was going with Blackburn’s legislation as a vehicle. Democrats who’d worked with Blackburn on the Senate’s flavor of KOSA were allegedly left out of the loop, too. On top of that, there was a separate, bipartisan-backed AI preemption bill currently floating around the House.

It resulted in a week of total confusion for backers of either policy: AI preemption and child safety might be lumped together in order to ensure preemption gets signed into law, but whose version of child safety gets passed is unclear. Was it the Senate’s stricter KOSA? Was it the looser version backed by House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA)? And where was the White House in all of this?

“No one knows really who’s driving this thing,” a Republican lobbyist for a midsize tech company told The Verge. “Everyone is deeply, deeply, deeply skeptical of [the bill’s] movement, because everyone is on such different pages. I think the House is not going to move anything that Blackburn wants.”

Though the AI regulatory fight has caused huge fissures between GOP leadership and their populist members, President Donald Trump himself has called for the passage of an AI preemption bill, meaning that the Republican Party must somehow make this happen. These days, the White House’s policy wonks are trying to finesse a preemption approach influenced by Mike Davis, a Trump-allied lawyer and the founder of the Article III Project, who led a successful attempt to kill a different AI moratorium in the Senate last year.

Broadly speaking, to win Davis’ approval, preemption law should meaningfully protect a set of values Davis called the “Four Cs”: children, conservatives, creators, and communities. Some of those values were included in the White House’s proposed draft of a comprehensive AI law, released in March of this year, and the inclusion of KOSA satisfied the “children” requirement. But Davis told The Verge that he wanted any legislation to address all four. “There is no chance in hell AI preemption will pass if it does not address the Four Cs. I will make damn sure of that. Again.”

Getting KOSA passed, however, involves reconciling a massive difference between the House and Senate versions of the same bill. The Senate’s version would require tech companies to assume a “duty of care,” preemptive measures to protect young users, and would extend that responsibility to AI companies as well. However, the House version, spearheaded by Scalise, diluted that provision late last November, to the fury of child safety advocates. The House’s exclusion from the White House’s discussions, therefore, was notable to onlookers. “[Blackburn] genuinely does not want House KOSA,” noted Michael Toscano, senior fellow and director of the Family First Technology Initiative for the conservative Institute for Family Studies.

Even if Trump were to whip the House Republicans into line, they’d have another problem: the congressional Democrats, who’d also learned of Blackburn’s negotiations with the White House at the same time the House Republicans did. Though Senate KOSA was cosponsored by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and overwhelmingly passed 91–3 in 2024, they had not been aware that their legislation would now be handcuffed to the unpopular goal of AI preemption. “If they [Blackburn and the White House] are looking at a standalone bill, it’ll have to go through the Senate,” said an AI policy advocate, noting that a new version of this bill would then require 60 votes — and therefore, Democrats — to pass.

And even if the bill had some amount of popularity, the schedule might not allow for it. “It is mid June. You have a month and a half before people leave for [five-week] recess. And then it’s [general] election season,” said the AI policy advocate. “There’s just no way.” The remaining weeks on the legislative calendar are already being sucked up by more immediate matters: the renewal of FISA, an immigration crackdown package, increased defense spending for Trump’s war with Iran, a crypto market structure bill, affordability measures, and the controversial SAVE America election bill. Oh, and the regular budget items like Medicaid.

Having preemption and KOSA chained together presents Big Tech with a difficult choice: Do they want a blanket federal AI preemption more than they want immunity from “duty of care”? And they don’t have much time to make this choice, noted the Republican tech lobbyist, especially if Democrats take one chamber. “After the election, what incentive do the Democrats have to support anything? Like, why wouldn’t they say, ‘Fuck you, we’re gonna do our thing in the new Congress?’ I’m deeply skeptical.”

Austin Carson, the former head of Nvidia’s government relations operations and the founder of Seed AI, a nonprofit focused on increasing access to AI for local communities, was more dubious that the KOSA-preemption shotgun marriage of convenience would succeed. “I can’t imagine a scenario where [this bill] would move,” he told The Verge. “I cannot imagine it.”

Tina Nguyen Close Tina Nguyen Senior Reporter, Washington Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Tina Nguyen

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