On the topic of states rights, Donald Trump doesn’t exactly follow the party line. During his first term, he couched himself in populist, small-government rhetoric — even as he attacked individual states that dared to defend migrants and legalize marijuana.
Nearly a year into his second term in office, Trump is again bombarding states’ rights, by deploying federal police to states whose politicians don’t want them there, attacking state-level mail-in ballot initiatives, and laying siege to state climate regulations.
His latest move is geared toward state regulation of AI. In a new executive order, titled “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence,” Trump gave the office of the attorney general broad authority to sue states and overturn consumer protection laws that go against the “United States’ global AI dominance.”
The result is ironic for Republicans, who have long branded themselves as defending children from threats both real and imagined: as a result of the new order, numerous state-level child-safety regulations safeguarding kids from AI chatbots are on the chopping block. These include regulations from both red and blue states, such as California’s AI safety testing and disclosure law, as well as mental health disclosure requirements and data collection restrictions imposed by Utah, Illinois, and Nevada.
Given that federal AI regulation is pretty much nonexistent, these laws are basically the last line of defense for kids, who’ve quickly become victims of the tech industry’s AI free-for-all. For example, OpenAI’s ChatGPT has been roundly blamed for encouraging a 16-year-old to kill himself, while Google has been accused of running an AI-powered social experiment on kids and teens, with similarly tragic results.
“Blocking state laws regulating AI is an unacceptable nightmare for parents and anyone who cares about protecting children online,” Sarah Gardner, the chief executive of child safety group Heat Initiative told the New York Times. “States have been the only effective line of defense against AI harms.”
Overtly, the order is meant to ease the burden of overbearing regulation on American AI companies, so that the US can maintain its lead in the “AI race” over China. But as policy analysts and researchers have noted, the AI race is basically a myth pushed by American war hawks, as the two nations pursue differing goals.
In the real world, the order is little more than a massive handout to the tech corporations that are now responsible for the vast majority of GDP growth in the US. Though AI has yet to bring most companies the kind of epic profits we’re told are coming any minute now, Trump’s order works to accelerate the capital accumulation process by removing barriers to revenue driven by AI exploitation.
Put another way, by concentrating the power to regulate AI at the federal level, Trump isn’t simply undermining state’s rights — but actively tipping the scale in favor of big tech corporations at the expense of American workers and their children.
More on child safety: Vast Numbers of Lonely Kids Are Using AI as Substitute Friends
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