Amazon and Google lead a push to ban state AI regulations for 10 years. The tech giants want the Senate to pass a federal moratorium blocking states from regulating AI models. The move is part of the House’s budget bill, passed last month, with the Senate set to unveil its version soon aiming for a July 4 vote.
Lobbyists, including former congressman Chip Pickering of INCOMPAS, are backing the ban. Members pushing it include Microsoft, Meta, and smaller firms across data and infrastructure sectors.
Pickering told the Financial Times this is about American leadership and competing with China: 
“This is the right policy at the right time for American leadership,” Pickering said.
“But it’s equally important in the race against China.”
Amazon’s chief security officer for AWS, Steve Schmidt, added to Bloomberg:
“The tension with regulation of any kind is that it tends to retard progress,” Schmidt said.
“So the way we tend to focus on standards is to let the industry figure out what the right standards are, and that will be driven by our customers.”
Critics accuse Big Tech of using this moratorium to cement dominance over artificial general intelligence (AGI) development.
MIT professor Max Tegmark called it:
“[It’s] a power grab by tech bro-ligarchs attempting to concentrate yet more wealth and power,”
Tegmark said. He leads the Future of Life Institute, which advocates AI regulation.
Over 140 organizations signed a letter urging House leaders to reject the ban:
“This moratorium would mean that even if a company deliberately designs an algorithm that causes foreseeable harm — regardless of how intentional or egregious the misconduct or how devastating the consequences — the company making that bad tech would be unaccountable to lawmakers and the public,” the letter warned.
The moratorium is splitting Republicans, too. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted:
“We have no idea what AI will be capable of in the next 10 years and giving it free rein and tying states hands is potentially dangerous,”
Greene posted on X.
“This needs to be stripped out in the Senate.”
