One provision of the “big, beautiful bill” that the Senate must reject is its 10-year moratorium prohibiting state-law regulation of artificial intelligence. Although the Commerce Committee amended the provision to condition federal broadband funding on compliance with the moratorium, the effect is the same disservice to the American people.
Members of Congress would likely have to search a long time find voters in their states who favor giving Big Tech a decade to “see where AI leads,” while it would take no time to find voters who care about child pornography, online scams and threats to their economic interests — all of which may be caused or accelerated by AI.
In fact, several states, including Republican strongholds, have already passed legislation directly aimed at mitigating the harms facilitated by AI. Indiana, Kansas, Mississippi, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas have all passed or proposed legislation specifically prohibiting the use of AI for the creation and distribution of child sexual abuse material — and that’s just by my latest count.
Will Washington lawmakers tell parents back home that a federal moratorium may preempt these laws because tech billionaires in California need more government protection than the children in their communities?
Congress has already let American children down with its failure to rein in Big Tech and the myriad harms caused by social media, and it should decline to repeat this still-uncorrected error by continuing its laissez-faire approach to AI.
From an economic perspective, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) was right to criticize the moratorium provision by noting that her state showed leadership in passing the ELVIS Act, which prohibits uses of AI for unlicensed replication of voice and likeness.
This 2024 law, enacted by the music-powerhouse state, was a model for the federal NO FAKES Act, reintroduced in April by bipartisan leaders in both chambers. If passed, this legislation would create a new intellectual property right in every individual’s voice and likeness and prohibit replication without permission.
It is praiseworthy legislation, but the bill in no way obviates the right and duty of the states to prioritize their own prohibitions on abuses of AI.
On the contrary, given the Republicans’ appetite for gutting federal agencies like the Department of Education, individual states and communities will presumably have little federal support in addressing the growing problem of students targeting fellow students with AI-enabled child sexual abuse material.
The group 404 Media cites a Stanford Cyber Policy Center report revealing that communities are scrambling to respond to the volume of AI apps that can be downloaded in seconds and used to ruin a child’s (usually a girl’s) life in a matter of hours.
Even though further criminalizing production, distribution or possession of child sexual abuse material would not conflict with the proposed moratorium, why would Congress hamstring the states’ options in confronting the technologies that foster this novel and destructive trend?
The question is acutely relevant given Congress’s unimpressive record in meaningfully confronting Big Tech, even after the “techlash” that began in 2017. Since then, Democratic and Republican leaders have held desk-pounding hearings blasting tech CEOs on camera for their negligence and utter disregard for public safety and legitimate trade.
In January 2024, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) declared that it’s “time to repeal Section 230,” after telling Mark Zuckerberg, “you have blood on your hands.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said, “We’re here because your platforms really suck at policing themselves.”
Yet, even while the senators regret the 1990s-era folly of allowing Big Tech “room to flourish,” they are poised to repeat it with technology fraught with hazards and security risks absent meaningful guardrails.
It is clear to many of us that the tech-bros in Silicon Valley read the same sci-fi stories, but instead of cautionary tales, they saw adventure. Congress should categorically refuse to wait and see whether that adventure takes the American people over a cliff.
David Newhoff is a writer, author and consultant. He writes the blog The Illusion of More and is the author of “Who Invented Oscar Wilde: The Photograph at the Center of Modern American Copyright.”