U.S. Big Tech pushes for a 10-year ban on state regulation of Artificial Intelligence

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There is a call by Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other Big Tech lobbyists for a "moratorium" on AI regulation. It has split industry and the Republican party but is expected to get through.

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BY:

Angela Delvecchio

Attorney/Avvocato - U.S./Italy

Legal Affairs Reporter

Member of the Project Counsel Media team

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18 June 2025 (Washington, DC) -- As we reported on Monday, the European Union’s rules to rein in artificial intelligence risks are barely a year old but they’ve already fallen out of favor. There have been a series of *rethink* meetings at the EU Commission and all signals are that the substantive parts of the much-lauded AI Act will be postponed. Much of that is being driven by how it will put European industry on the back foot. "We are getting killed in a marketplace where we can offer no competition" said one EU company executive we interviewed.

Here in the U.S. competition (and China) are front an center.

Big Tech companies have launched a massive lobbying campaign to pass a 10-year ban on U.S. states regulating artificial intelligence models, in a controversial move that has split the AI industry and the MAGA crowd. Lobbyists have been urging the U.S. Senate to enact a decade-long moratorium on individual states introducing their own efforts to legislate AI.

NOTE: the provision was passed as part of the U.S. House of Representatives’ version of Trump’s budget bill last month. The Senate hopes to unveil its version as soon as this week in the hope of passing the legislation by July 4th.

Chip Pickering, a former congressman and the chief executive of INCOMPAS (the main lobbying group driving this) has advocated for the proposal on behalf of his tech trade association’s members, which includes almost every leading Big Tech company like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, as well as smaller data, energy and infrastructure companies, and several Big Law firms. As Pickering says in talk show after talk show and interview after interview:

“This is the right policy at the right time for American leadership. But it’s equally important in the race against China".

Critics say Big Tech’s stance is about ensuring their dominance in the race to build artificial general intelligence, generally understood as models that surpass human abilities in most areas. A 10-year moratorium would help them solidify their monopoly positions. Said Max Tegmark, an MIT professor and president of the Future of Life Institute, a non-profit that campaigns for AI regulation:

“It’s a power grab, pure and simply, by the tech bro-ligarchs attempting to concentrate yet more wealth and power".

The proposed moratorium has also divided the tech sector and Republican politicians, who have raised concerns about banning states from overseeing the powerful technology that has the potential to cause social and economic upheaval. Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, said during a Senate hearing last month, that any regulation would be "disastrous" for the U.S. The provision in the budget bill is necessary "to prevent a raft of inconsistent regional rules that could stifle innovation and cause the U.S. to lose ground to China". He said the industry can "self-regulate".

But critics say self-regulation will have disastrous societal consequences as Silicon Valley competes to release ever more and more powerful models.

Republicans pushing for including the proposal are now trying to figure out whether it complies with the Senate’s arcane rules, which mandate that every provision must have a budgetary impact for it to be included in a so-called “budget reconciliation” bill. The party is using the tactic so they can pass the bill without Democratic votes.

Ted Cruz, the top Republican on the Senate commerce committee, has proposed a rather clever workaround: states that don’t comply with the provision would be ineligible for billions in federal funding to expand broadband networks to underserved rural areas.

And it rings the bell, again, on why no AI regulation, no serious Big Tech regulation, no meaningful federal regulations on data protection have been passed so far: there is little political consensus on how to oversee such a fast-moving field, fast moving industry.

Which may be why Republican Senator Thom Tillis is getting such a following and the Senate will in all likelihood pass the provision. He said in an interview yesterday:

“You don’t want the number one country in the world for innovation to fall behind on AI. If all of a sudden you’ve got 50 different regulatory or legal frameworks, how can anybody in their right mind not understand that that’s going to be an impediment?

I don’t like doing something that starts restricting states’ abilities. But there may be some wisdom here, given that it could lead to a patchwork nature of regulation with AI that could hinder and slow down the United States".

The counter argument is provided by Republican Senator Josh Hawley:

“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”.

And so, here we go again. We probably ruined an entire generation born between 1988 - 2004 without constraining and implementing ethical policies on Social Media, resulting in wide-spread mental illness, social anxiety, depression, envy, deception, lies, lack of contentment, isolation, loneliness and lacking the ability to be authentic.

Rinse, repeat the whole process, and stretch out its elasticity with the all-brand-new toy that is Artificial Intelligence.

All for profit, all in the name of capitalism and never-ending, ever-so-sustainable growth that never exists.

At the end of the next 10 years: no ability to apply critical thinking, reasoning; having a sense of self by listening to your own voice in your voice; developing substance of matter, learning from blood, sweat and tears, achieving pure contentment through failing over and over again to succeed, and last of all authenticity. None of this will exist, and we'll need to wait and see what gremlins it will spawn out as it develops.

Reality-wise, regulation is all part of the innovation. If you get it right then you get the right outcomes rather than regulating post the event. But the U.S. political class has neither the brains nor the political capital to get something properly done.

Which is why, as my boss Greg Bufithis said, the question is boiled down to something simple, something anybody can understand: whether unregulated AI gives the U.S. military an advantage, and how to manage it, and what needs to be done to prepare for that risk.

I chatted with Greg as I was writing this, looking for the "Big Picture" angle (which he is so good at). Here is part of our conversation (emphasis inserts are mine):

Look, there is nothing really new here. I have said much of this before. AI has thrown into the 21st century promising opportunities we have never known - matched at the same time by a geo-politico-technological instability we have never known. 

But trying to regulate AI is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. It will never work. The attempt to direct this fast-changing category of mathematical tools through legislation or traditional regulatory mechanisms, no matter how well-intentioned, is unlikely to be successful and is much more likely to have negative unanticipated consequences, including delaying and misdirecting technical development. AI is the application of a set of mathematical algorithms, and you can’t regulate math.

As if that were not enough, by shifting the structure and balance of global power, AI complicates the very political context in which it is governed. 

AI is not just software development as usual; it is an entirely new means of projecting power. In some cases, it will upend existing authorities; in others, it will entrench them. Moreover, its advancement is being propelled by irresistible incentives: every nation, corporation, and individual will want some version of it.

Within countries, AI will empower those who wield it to surveil, deceive, and even control populations - supercharging the collection and commercial use of personal data in democracies and sharpening the tools of repression authoritarian governments use to subdue their societies. Across countries, AI will be the focus of intense geopolitical competition. 

Whether for its repressive capabilities, economic potential, or military advantage, AI supremacy will be a strategic objective of every government with the resources to compete. The least imaginative strategies will pump money into homegrown AI champions or attempt to build and control supercomputers and algorithms. More nuanced strategies will foster specific competitive advantages, as France seeks to do by directly supporting AI startups; the United Kingdom, by capitalizing on its world-class universities and venture capital ecosystem - and the EU, by trying to shape the global conversation on regulation and norms because that is all the EU can do. But it has failed. "The Brussels effect" is now dead.

The vast majority of countries have neither the money nor the technological know-how to compete for AI leadership. Their access to frontier AI will instead be determined by their relationships with a handful of already rich and powerful corporations and states. This dependence threatens to aggravate current geopolitical power imbalances.

Look at the current Iran-Israel war. The war in Gaza. Even the war in Ukraine. Look at what advanced AI tech has rendered. The most powerful governments will vie to control the world’s most valuable resource.

The competition for AI supremacy will be fierce. Trump has put America on a war footing. Rightly or wrongly, the two players that matter most - China and the United States - both see AI development as a zero-sum game that will give the winner a decisive strategic edge in the decades to come. 

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