No Rules, No Exceptions

The latest version of the Republicans’ Budget Reconciliation Bill — the “one big, beautiful bill,” as President Trump has called it — includes a clause that would ban all AI regulation in the US at the state level for a full decade. Over 100 organizations, CNN reports, are calling for lawmakers not to pass it.

According to CNN, 141 policy groups, academic institutions, unions, and other organizations have signed a letter demanding that legislators in Washington walk back the sweeping deregulatory provision, urging that the bill would allow AI companies to run wild without safeguards or accountability — regardless of any negative impact their technology might have on American citizens.

The letter warns that under the proposal, Americans would have no way to institute regulatory safeguards around and against AI systems as they “increasingly shape critical aspects of Americans’ lives,” including in areas like “hiring, housing, healthcare, policing, and financial services.”

There aren’t any exceptions outlined in the bill, which declares instead that “no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the ten year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act,” as 404 Media was first to flag last week.

“The AI preemption provision is a dangerous giveaway to Big Tech CEOs who have bet everything on a society where unfinished, unaccountable AI is prematurely forced into every aspect of our lives,” Emily Peterson-Cassin of the nonprofit Demand Progress, whose organization wrote the letter, told CNN.

Forseeable Harm

In the letter, the groups emphasize that such a drastic moratorium on regulatory action would mean that even in cases where 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.”

Transformational new technologies can be riddled with unknown, chaotic, and sometimes quite destructive outcomes. And as the writers of the letter note, regulation can serve to fuel innovation, and not stifle it by way of a thousand Silicon Valley lobbying-dollar-funded cuts.

“Protecting people from being harmed by new technologies,” reads the letter, “including by holding companies accountable when they cause harm, ultimately spurs innovation and adoption of new technologies.”

“We will only reap the benefits of AI,” it continues, “if people have a reason to trust it.”

More on the bill: New Law Would Ban All AI Regulation for a Decade

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