Washington lawmakers had barely finished processing the news that Congress would not put a state AI law ban into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) when a new rumor began trickling out of the White House on Wednesday: President Donald Trump would, indeed, sign an executive order that would ostensibly assign the federal government the ability to punish states for writing their own AI laws.
There was the possibility that it would be as drastic as the one that had leaked from the White House weeks before, which would have given David Sacks, billionaire venture capitalist and the White House’s AI and crypto czar, immense influence over setting AI policy. There was the possibility that it would be watered down and symbolic, to face the political reality that an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose the idea of a state AI moratorium while satisfying Trump’s already stated desire for a moratorium.. But the prospect itself was so dire that it activated a group that rarely criticizes Trump: hard right MAGA Republican podcasters wired into the White House’s whisper networks.
Steve Bannon’s War Room devoted a massive segment on Wednesday night sounding the alarm that the order was still alive, and hoped to re-run the playbook that they’d used to kill last summer’s attempt at an AI moratorium. Their argument against a moratorium has grown more nakedly far right ever since. “If President Trump signs this executive order, he will incur the outrage of everyone who believed in him to defend legacy Americans against not only immigrants, but the tech companies who are probably a greater threat to their jobs and to their rights,” AI critic Joe Allen told host Natalie Winters on Thursday.
Behind the scenes, AI policy experts, lawyers, and politcal operatives — regardless of whether they were pro-preemption or not — were working their connections in the White House, hoping that someone could persuade Trump that a moratorium — at least, one that was so swift and aggressive — would be political suicide. Two people familiar with the dynamics of the White House said that the person most likely to succeed at stopping Trump at signing the EO was Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff who’d successfully imposed a sense of discipline on Trump’s political operations, is deeply trusted by Trump, and is famously averse to internal drama.
“She’s smart,” said a Republican operative working on AI policy. “I think she understands how this could be bad for the president, politically.”
Recent polling indicates that a vast, bipartisan majority of Americans oppose the idea of a state AI law moratorium. And few demographics are more hostile to the idea than the Republican MAGA base, who have long distrusted Big Tech and view AI as a threat to job security, traditional family values, and the mental health of their children. Backing a moratorium would be disastrous for potential Republican presidential candidates aligned with the MAGA base, such as Vice President J.D. Vance.
The upcoming midterms also are in play. Recent elections across the country indicate that the Republican Party already finds itself on tenuous footing: last month, New Yorkers soundly elected Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani over the Trump-backed Andrew Cuomo for mayor; meanwhile, Virginians elected Democrat Abigail Spanberger to the House over Republican Winsome Earl-Sears by a landslide. Just this week, the Republicans won a special election for a vacant Tennessee House seat by nine points — but in a district that Trump had won by 22 points in the presidential election.
Nothing is official until Trump puts pen to paper, but the draft executive order that leaked before Thanksgiving had stunned lawmakers, AI policy experts, and even advocates of preemption, the idea that the federal government should create one set of AI regulations instead of a 50-state patchwork. But rather than working on a federal framework, which would have enshrined AI regulations in a watertight, constitutionally legal manner, several Republicans and the Trump White House have instead pursued a harsher strategy: a blanket moratorium on state AI laws that would last years, arguing that it would allow AI innovation to accelerate while Congress worked on said framework.
The moratorium concept has proven divisive even within the GOP: during the first attempt at passing a moratorium in Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill, a handful of Senate Republicans broke rank with the party and joined Senate Democrats in opposing it. The latest hope was that a moratorium would be attached to the NDAA, which would have required both Democrats and Republicans on the Armed Services Committees to agree on the language.
But the draft executive order, released in the middle of bipartisan NDAA negotiations, was viewed as an overly aggressive consolidation of power under Sacks — a venture capitalist bristling at reports of his massive conflicts of interest— under the auspices of preemption. As it had been written, the order would have directed several departments to begin punish states with “onerous” AI laws — all of whom would need to coordinate with Sacks, the Special Advisor on AI and Crypto, while boxing out the government agencies with expertise in AI and technology, as well as the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the White House’s hub for tech-related interagency coordination
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