Trump issues executive order shutting down states' efforts to regulate AI

Just hours after New York passed new laws trying to get a toehold in controlling artificial intelligence, the White House issued an order attacking the basic concept.

By William Hughes  |  December 11, 2025 | 11:20pm
Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
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Trump issues executive order shutting down states' efforts to regulate AI

Well, that was fast. Earlier today, we reported that New York had joined a few other American states (Tennessee, Colorado, and especially California) in passing laws in an attempt to do some kind of regulation of artificial intelligence, since the Donald Trump White House had made it pretty clear that it wasn’t interested in doing any. But Governor Kathy Hochul signing a couple of SAG-AFTRA-backed bills about telling people when a TV commercial contains fake people was apparently the last straw, as Trump reached for his Executive Order pen on Thursday night and issued a sweeping new EO that, if followed, would cripple states’ ability to try to regulate this new technology outright. (Or, in Trump-speak, get in the way of “the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance the United States’ global AI dominance through a minimally burdensome national policy framework for AI.”)

This is not wholly surprising, in that Trump, who is friends with a lot of billionaires who have invested a lot of money in this slop, has not been afraid to throw his weight behind leaving the field almost entirely untouched by government regulation. (Just last month he signed an EO launching “The Genesis Mission,” which is sadly not an effort to create a new planet where Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel fans can finally live in peace, but a move to devote ever-more governmental resources to feeding the AI beast.)

Writing that previous efforts to deregulate this barely-regulated industry have already “delivered tremendous benefits to the American people” (hmm) “and led to trillions of dollars of investments across the country” (ahh), Trump announced that he was launching a new legal initiative to, basically, regulate the regulation. This new AI Litigation Task Force will exist solely for the purpose of identifying state laws that allegedly overstep their jurisdictions, or can be found to be “responsible for requiring entities to embed ideological bias within models,” or, of course, might just anger people who really, really don’t want the AI bubble to pop yet. Once identified, said states will then be targeted for withholding of federal funds through the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program that Joe Biden signed into existence back in 2021, a program designed to provide low-income homes with internet access. Charming!

Trump’s allies have been pushing for something like this for several months at this point; Ted Cruz, present for the signing, made an effort to get a 10-year moratorium on state AI regulation inserted into the (ugh) Big Beautiful Bill, but got shut down by both parties. (Ah, executive orders: As easy as the nearest pen!) Trump’s EO makes the (actually pretty relatable) point that a patchwork of 50 states’ worth of regulation is going to be pretty hard to apply to a technology like artificial intelligence, which lives on the internet and crosses state lines as a matter of course… and then pivots right back to detailing how Trump is going to specifically punish any laws that makes the computer tell lies about him, before ending by saying, yeah, sure, we’ll get some federal laws about this stuff on the books one of these days.

 
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