The Moratorium That Is No More
The US Senate Strikes the AI Policy Ban
After an overnight voting marathon, the US Senate removed the provision for a state AI legislation moratorium from the budget package. This is the right thing to do.
This was the wrong solution for a correctly identified problem: the fragmentation of AI policy and legislation in the US. A patchwork of state-level laws could slow the development and adoption of artificial intelligence, which has emerged as a critical and defining technology for the first part of this century. Declaring a ten-year moratorium, or its revised form as a five-year pause, was not the right solution.
Federal preemption is needed to avoid the patchwork. But this should take the form of federal-level regulation or one of an emerging set of alternative governance models, including the Dynamic Governance that my team has proposed.
Technology and AI policy should be as much about what to do as it is about what not to do. It is time for Congress and the administration to set a positive AI agenda for the U.S. Earlier this year, Congress passed its first regulatory act in years, setting a precedent for a duty of care by tech companies regarding non-consensual intimate images. The administration is about to unveil an AI Action Plan. There is momentum toward smart policies that balance innovation, adoption, and necessary guardrails.