America’s coming war over AI regulation

In 2026, states will go head to head with the White House’s sweeping executive order.

TL;DR

President Trump signed an executive order to prevent states from regulating artificial intelligence, aiming for a national policy to boost US competitiveness.
The executive order directs federal departments to sue states with AI laws conflicting with the administration's vision and to withhold broadband funding from states with 'onerous' laws.
States like New York and California have enacted AI safety laws, focusing on transparency, bias, and preventing catastrophic harms, despite industry lobbying.
The battle over AI regulation is expected to move to the courts, with potential legal challenges to Trump's executive order.
Super PACs, funded by tech moguls and AI-safety advocates, are pouring money into elections to support their preferred AI regulation visions.
Public anxiety about AI's impact on mental health, jobs, and the environment is increasing demand for regulation.
Litigation is increasing regarding AI's role in suicides and self-harm, with ongoing lawsuits against companies like Google and Character Technologies.
States are also moving to pass child safety laws related to chatbots, which may be exempt from federal restrictions.
Efforts to regulate data centers and address potential job displacement by AI are also emerging at the state level.
Deep-pocketed tech companies are using super PACs to support candidates advocating for deregulation, while counter-efforts are backing AI regulation proponents.

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The Adolescence of Technology: an essay on the risks posed by powerful AI to national security, economies and democracy—and how we can defend against them: https://t.co/0phIiJjrmz

Dario Amodei

Replying to @DarioAmodei

I've been working on this essay for a while, and it is mainly about AI and about the future. But given the horror we're seeing in Minnesota, its emphasis on the importance of preserving democratic values and rights at home is particularly relevant.

Elon Musk reposted

Bitcoin Teddy

MARC ANDREESSEN: "We had meetings with the Biden admin where they told us to not even start AI companies because there's no way they'll let them succeed."

JOE ROGAN: "What do you do after a meeting like that?"

MARC ANDREESSEN: "You go endorse Donald Trump."

LMAO https://t.co/0wyKx9EuZk

Dario Amodei

Today I'm publishing a new essay, Policy on the AI Exponential. AI is progressing extremely fast—much faster than the policy process was built to handle. The essay lays out where I think the technology is now, and the action needed to close the gap: https://t.co/Lh6PWae178

Yann LeCun reposted

Conor

Replying to @DarioAmodei

TLDR:

1. Declare AI too dangerous for ordinary competition so you propose a regulatory regime where only the largest incumbents can survive

2. Warn about labor displacement while selling the product to executives as a labor-displacement tool

3. Warn about state overreach while

Yann LeCun reposted

Daniel Jeffries

This ugly reality is staring us right in the face:

Americans will have walled AI gardens where we beg for access from a few East India companies, open source will get banned on national security grounds, and 6 billion people who aren't American, aka the rest of the world, will standardized on a Chinese AI stack.

Bloated. Broken. Slow. Ugly.

There's still time to change it but it's slipping through our fingers like fast running sand.

Read this passage below from Bill Gurley because it's about to become our hideous reality if we don't change course quickly.

"If a credible Western open frontier player does not emerge, the consequences cascade quickly.

This is the inverse of the early Internet wave. In the 2000s and 2010s, Western companies — Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft — dominated globally while China carved out its own walled garden. The AI version flips that dynamic on its head. Without a credible Western open frontier player, the only open models capable of running entire economies are made in China. If U.S. policy further restricts Chinese open-weight access on national-security grounds, the U.S. ends up with two or three closed Cathedrals serving the U.S. market — and the rest of the world picks the AI stack that is free, capable, self-hostable, and not embargoed. Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, India, the Middle East. Roughly six billion people. Chinese open models become the global default by 2030, and the United States ends up technologically isolated from the majority of the world’s AI users. We would have done it to ourselves."

Fully essay in replies.

clem 🤗 reposted

Adam Thierer

“We're in a weird state of the world where the supposedly totalitarian regime is trying to open up the technology, and the supposedly democratic government system is trying to restrict and control technology. We're in, like, opposite world.” - @pmarca 🎯 https://t.co/KFOoTASKab

Yann LeCun reposted

Adam Thierer

We stand at a critical crossroads in the debate over AI governance in the United States, and it feels like we are inching closer to a very serious battle over whether or not open source models will even be allowed in an environment where a new de facto licensing regime has been taking shape.

Lacking formal congressional statutory frameworks or clear administration rules (like the diffusion rule revision), we appear to be left with a sporadic, arbitrary, non-transparent process for model review. The fiction of “voluntary” agreements hangs over this debate, and some large model developers are already showing an incredible willingness to bend over backwards to accommodate national security-related officials / orders that the rest of us are not privy to. It's a very opaque process. And those model developers are expected to play ball with those officials, or else their models get pulled from the market or held up for long periods. Or they will lose any government procurement contracts they have. There is nothing “voluntary” about it when that Sword of Damocles hangs in the room.

As this mess worsens, at some point the question of how to handle open source models will come into sharper focus because it will have to. I've even heard some rumors lately that something may be coming from the admin on this front to address this.

Needless to say, if this informal new AI model review regime expands and takes on more pre-vetting characteristics / requirements, it is hard to see how open source players could comply with such quasi-licensing of AI models. Specifically, if this ambiguous new regime is accompanied by a general presumption of ‘restrict-until-permitted,’ then that would spell doom for open source. That is a very dark path for our country.

Worse yet, of course, would be a move by national security officials to more directly restrict open source models and capabilities. If that happens, then we would be right back in the thick of a Clipper Chip-like battle along the lines of what we saw in the late 1990s. That is a much darker path for America.

Meanwhile, open source developers have no “golden shares” or other goodies to offer the government to make their problems go away.

Let’s be clear: If our government takes the dark path, it will become the single most important battle over computational freedom of modern times. It is time for people to make a stand in defense of open source before it is too late.

clem 🤗 reposted

David Sacks

This is concerning. For the first time, a Chinese model Kimi K3 has taken #1 on the Frontend Code Arena and is scoring at or near the frontier on other benchmarks.

Meanwhile America is tying itself in knots: politicians and bureaucrats are banning new data centers, piling on state regulations, and pushing for new federal agencies to pre-approve frontier models.

This is how you lose the AI race. The rest of the world won’t play by our rules if we bog ourselves down. Permissionless innovation is how America won the internet and became the technological envy of the world. We can do it again with AI -- while addressing risks in a targeted way -- or we’ll watch our lead evaporate.

David Sacks reposted

The All-In Podcast

🚨 POD UP! The Core Four is BACK

The Besties discuss:

-- Can the AI Industry Regulate Itself?

-- Stripe Bids $53B for PayPal w/ Block and Advent ($PYPL)

-- The Death of Tokenmaxxing?

-- Apple Sues OpenAI ($AAPL)

-- Grok Build Data Leak ($SPCX)

-- The Datacenter Psyop, NY's Ban

-- Science Corner: Aging Reversal Breakthrough?

(0:00) Bestie intros!

(1:32) New AI regulatory proposal: DeepMind's Demis Hassabis proposes FINRA-type body

(20:01) Stripe, Block, and Advent offer $53B to acquire PayPal

(37:51) Apple sues OpenAI, alleging stolen trade secrets

(42:49) Grok Build data leak, AI data privacy, Tokenmaxxing update, Mira Murati's new model

(59:53) NY bans datacenters, China catches up

(1:22:57) Science Corner: New data on reversing aging!

David Sacks

I’m not sure whether Dean Ball is confessing to a regulatory capture strategy or simply predicting this will happen (he now says the latter). Either way, the weaponization of regulatory uncertainty as a competitive tool should be completely unacceptable.

He argues there’s no need to ban Chinese open-source models — just direct agencies to issue soft-law warnings that create enough FUD so regulated enterprises back off. “It needn’t be that well justified.”

Wrong. Regulatory decisions should always be well justified and grounded in facts, logic, and evidence, not the deliberate exploitation of fear and uncertainty. Implementing a surreptitious policy through manufactured doubt — rather than strong and explicit justification — corrodes the rule of law and invites future abuse against anyone.

We are at a critical inflection point in AI policy. The leading closed labs, already a duopoly in terms of AI model revenue, want the government to eliminate their open source competition. They have laid their cards on the table. It is time for the rest of Silicon Valley — the vast majority that still values open competition — to do the same.

David Sacks reposted

The All-In Podcast

David Sacks: Anthropic Wants to Ban Open Source AI in America

Listen to All-In to stay a few weeks (or months) ahead of everyone else

@DavidSacks back in May:

“I think where it's all leading to is an effort to ban open source models.

There's a lot of breadcrumbs leading here.

You look at a lot of the rhetoric around how models need to have guardrails, and that with open source models, the guardrails can be removed and therefore they're dangerous.

You see this rhetoric already in Anthropic's blog posts.

Any threat that they describe, they kind of go out of their way to take that shot at open source models.

They're trying to create ideas or put predicate facts in the public record to justify an action later on.

I think it's just a matter of time before they feel like they're at a position where maybe they can push for that type of ban directly.”