Tech Giants Seek 10-Year Freeze on State AI Rules

However, this effort by the likes of Amazon and Google has divided the AI industry and the Republican party, the Financial Times (FT) reported Wednesday (June 18).

As that report notes, sources say that lobbyists for the tech companies have been pushing the Senate to impose a decade-long ban on AI regulations by individual states. The provision was included in the House’s version of President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful” budget bill, which passed last month. The Senate could unveil its version of the bill this week, with the goal of passing it by July 4.

Chip Pickering, a former congressman and the CEO of INCOMPAS, has lobbied for the proposal on behalf of his tech trade association’s members, which include Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Google, along with smaller data, energy and infrastructure companies and law firms.

“This is the right policy at the right time for American leadership,” Pickering told the Financial Times. “But it’s equally important in the race against China.”

Steve Schmidt, chief security officer for Amazon and AWS, told Bloomberg News last week that government involvement in AI could limit the scale of the company’s work in that field.

“The tension with regulation of any kind is that it tends to retard progress,” Schmidt said. “So the way we tend to focus on standards is to let the industry figure out what the right standards are, and that will be driven by our customers.”

However, critics say this effort is Big Tech’s way of maintaining dominance in the drive to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI models that meet or exceed human abilities.

“[It’s] a power grab by tech bro-ligarchs attempting to concentrate yet more wealth and power,” said Max Tegmark, an MIT professor and president of the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit that advocates for AI regulation.

And last month, a group of 140 organizations sent a letter to House leadership, asking them to reject the 10-year ban.

“This moratorium would mean that even if a company deliberately designs an algorithm that causes foreseeable harm — regardless of how intentional or egregious the misconduct or how devastating the consequences — the company making that bad tech would be unaccountable to lawmakers and the public,” the letter stated.

The FT report notes that the moratorium has divided Republicans, whose party leader reversed his predecessor’s executive order on AI.

“We have no idea what AI will be capable of in the next 10 years and giving it free rein and tying states hands is potentially dangerous,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) posted on X. “This needs to be stripped out in the Senate.”