Trump to Sign Executive Order Preventing States From Regulating AI

President Donald Trump said Monday (Dec. 8) that he will sign an executive order giving the federal government exclusive jurisdiction over artificial intelligence.

“There must be only One Rulebook if we are going to continue to lead in AI,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social. “We are beating ALL COUNTRIES at this point in the race, but that won’t last long if we are going to have 50 States, many of them bad actors, involved in RULES and the APPROVAL PROCESS. THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT ABOUT THIS! AI WILL BE DESTROYED IN ITS INFANCY! I will be doing a ONE RULE Executive Order this week. You can’t expect a company to get 50 Approvals every time they want to do something. THAT WILL NEVER WORK!”

It was reported Tuesday (Dec. 2) that Republican leadership on Capitol Hill confirmed that an AI moratorium would not be added to a must-pass National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) as proposed in November, despite intense pressure from the White House to include it.

The AI moratorium would have imposed a ban on states enacting laws to regulate artificial intelligence.

Its exclusion from the NDAA marked the second time leadership was forced to strip the provision from a larger bill. The state-law moratorium measure was originally attached to the sweeping “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed in August but was stripped out in the face of bipartisan opposition.

It was reported in November that the Trump administration was considering new challenges to state-level AI regulation, including an executive order calling for an attorney general-led task force to challenge AI laws deemed too burdensome.

The order would also call for federal funding to be withheld from those states via a federal interest access program, The Wall Street Journal reported at the time, citing a draft of the order seen by the WSJ, as well as sources familiar with the discussion.

Big Tech companies have pressed the White House and Congress to pass legislation that would block states from regulating AI.

Tech industry representatives argue that the regulation would slow the development of artificial intelligence, that a patchwork of state laws would be more difficult to deal with than federal legislation, and that regulations should apply to how the technology is used, rather than the technology itself.

However, there is a growing divide on AI regulation and development between the federal government and the states.

State lawmakers have introduced hundreds of bills addressing a wide range of AI-related issues.

On Thursday (Dec. 4), Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), a potential 2028 presidential candidate, announced a package of legislative proposals aimed at protecting Floridians’ personal data from misuse by AI systems and restricting development of data centers.

Without sufficient safeguards, DeSantis said at a news conference, AI could usher in “an age of darkness and deceit.”