U.S. Senate strikes AI regulation ban from Trump megabill

The Republican-led U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to take away a 10-year federal moratorium on state regulation of synthetic intelligence from President Trump’s sweeping tax-cut and spending invoice.

Lawmakers voted 99-1 to strike the ban from the invoice by adopting an modification supplied by Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn. The motion got here throughout a marathon session often called a “vote-a-rama,” during which lawmakers supplied quite a few amendments to the laws that Republicans finally hope to move.

Republican Senator Thom Tillis was the lone lawmaker who voted to retain the ban.

The Senate model of Trump’s laws would have solely restricted states regulating AI from tapping a brand new $500 million fund to help AI infrastructure.

Major AI firms, together with Alphabet’s Google and OpenAI, have expressed help for Congress taking AI regulation out of the palms of states to free innovation from a panoply of differing necessities.

Blackburn introduced her modification to strike the supply a day after agreeing to compromise language with Senate Commerce Committee chair Ted Cruz that may have lower the ban to 5 years and allowed states to manage points similar to defending artists’ voices or youngster on-line security if they didn’t impose an “undue or disproportionate burden” on AI.

But Blackburn withdrew her help for the compromise earlier than the modification vote.

“The current language is not acceptable to those who need these protections the most,” the Tennessee Republican stated in a press release.

“Until Congress passes federally preemptive legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act and an online privacy framework, we can’t block states from making laws that protect their citizens.”