AI Moratorium Defeating Coalition is Already Fighting Back
“Big Tech CEOs and their Republican allies in Congress are resurrecting the politically-toxic AI preemption rider to give their law-breaking companies a blanket get-out-of-jail-free card. Big Tech AI’s dangerous products are killing people, discriminating against vulnerable communities, and jacking up energy bills. Americans cannot afford AI amnesty,” said Sacha Haworth, Executive Director of The Tech Oversight Project. “To be clear: Nothing has fundamentally changed between now and Big Tech’s stunning 99-1 defeat on the floor of the Senate, except that more people have been scammed and more kids are dead. Democrats and Republicans need to rise up and defeat this Big Tech handout once and for all.”
Punchbowl News: House eyeing AI preemption in NDAA, Scalise says
By Jake Sherman, Ben Brody, and Diego Areas Munhoz on 11/17/25
House Republican leaders are searching for a legislative vehicle they could attach language to that would effectively ban state regulation of artificial intelligence. And the next possibility they’re debating is the annual defense policy bill, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told us Monday.
“We’re still looking at trying to do that,” Scalise said after we asked about tech policies in the National Defense Authorization Act.
Scalise lamented that a prior effort to overrule state AI policies via the GOP reconciliation bill collapsed earlier this year. States’ rights Republicans and social conservatives united with Democrats to defeat the proposal.
“We obviously tried on preemption in the One Big Beautiful Bill,” Scalise said. “It got removed.”
It would be a really big lift to get this done in the NDAA. The effort would need support from some, if not all, of the same members and senators who worked to get the preemption policy stripped from the reconciliation bill. Leaders generally don’t want add-on policies to the NDAA to lose votes for the overall package. There also isn’t a ton of time left to negotiate a compromise.
If at first you don’t succeed… Preemption has been a top tech policy goal for the White House and Republicans like Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz (Texas). They see varying state regulations as destroying AI innovation and handing the 21st-century tech race to China.
Cruz and others have repeatedly made clear they want to try again after the failure of their first attempt.
House GOP leaders, however, have stayed quiet about the issue until now.
Federal standard. Some advocates of preemption have said the next try should leave in place more state policies or deliver federal standards to replace them.
The concern over a patchwork of state AI laws slowing down the technology’s development is bipartisan. Moderate Democrats and members of the California delegation have told us over the past few months that they are interested in establishing a federal AI law that preempts states.
But those Democrats reinforce that they’re not interested in a blanket pause on AI regulation without a federal standard first. Several conservative Republicans are in the same boat.
