At an event on Wednesday, Trump said it would be a “disaster” for 50 states to regulate AI, “because then you would have one ‘woke’ state.”
Republicans like Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, chair of the Commerce Committee, have repeatedly warned that allowing blue states to regulate the technology would lead to “woke” AI models.
Some concerned about Republicans’ earlier preemption push are already raising questions about the legality of the draft executive order.
Mackenzie Arnold, director of U.S. policy at LawAI and an attorney who analyzed the failed moratorium, argued that states have the authority to regulate technology within their borders and that the laws passed so far don’t run afoul of federal powers under the Commerce Clause.
“The EO is an instruction to look into this, but there’s a chance that if the task force interprets that instruction very broadly, they won’t have the better argument,” he told POLITICO. “It remains to be seen how they’ll actually act on that.”
State legislators are also pushing back against the draft order.
Trump “has no power to issue a royal edict canceling state laws,” said California State Sen. Scott Wiener, author of a new AI safety law in California that the order appears to reference.
