AI Regulation: Senate Bill Would Provide One Federal Law to Rule Them All

Last month, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) announced that she would introduce legislation in the Senate to establish the kind of minimally burdensome national standard for regulating AI called for in President Trump’s executive order preempting certain state AI laws.

According to Sen. Blackburn, the legislation, which she is calling The Republic Unifying Meritocratic Performance Advancing Machine intelligence by Eliminating Regulatory Interstate Chaos Across American Industry (TRUMP AMERICA AI Act), “protects children, creators, conservatives, and communities from harm while ensuring the United States wins the global race for AI supremacy.”

Anyway, she’s also published this section-by-section summary of the proposed legislation. Despite its silly and sycophantic name, the summary indicates that Sen. Blackburn’s bill is a serious albeit polarizing effort. Among other things, the Trump America AI Act would:

– Impose a duty of care on developers, require risk assessments and FTC-imposed safeguards, mandate the development of catastrophic risk protocols by large frontier developers, and impose regular DHS reporting obligations on those developers.

– Establish reporting requirements concerning the impact of AI on jobs, narrow the Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act’s immunity provisions, and permit liability for harms under product safety and privacy laws.

– Require social media platforms to implement tools and safeguards to protect minors from sex trafficking, suicide, and other abuses.

– Create a federal right for individuals to sue companies for using their data (personal, copyrighted) for AI training without explicit consent and require affirmative consent for data use in AI model.

The legislation would also establish a Federal AI Safety Institute at NIST, and a National AI Research Resource intended to remove barriers to essential tools and infrastructure that power artificial intelligence research and development. It would also require data center operators to be responsible for the full cost of all energy and water infrastructure needed for their operation, without impacting rate payers.

This legislation has already been slammed by critics – and not just those on the Left.  For example, here’s an excerpt from what Reason magazine had to say about it:

Sometimes you can tell a bill will be really bad just from its title. So it goes with The Republic Unifying Meritocratic Performance Advancing Machine Intelligence by Eliminating Regulatory Interstate Chaos Across American Industry Act, from Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.). And, boy, does it deliver on that disaster of a name, managing to combine nearly every bad tech policy idea of the past half-decade—including gutting Section 230 and creating new requirements around the suppression of sexuality online—into one massive piece of Trump-branded legislation.