California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two AI safety bills last week, while Donald Trump dismissed calls for stronger controls as a “HOAX” and said the only guardrails AI needs are a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.” That’s the fight now: state leaders trying to rein in a fast-growing industry, and the White House insisting the federal government should keep the leash in its own hands.
Who Holds the Leash
Trump’s position has been blunt. He said new rules would hurt the economy and boost China, and in social media posts he called efforts to curb AI growth part of a “SICK conspiracy” to benefit China in the race to develop the technology. The White House said it is “committed to implementing a comprehensive AI framework,” claiming that approach would protect children, intellectual property and communities while maintaining U.S. leadership in AI. A White House official warned that “conflicting state laws” would undermine American innovation and said “the most restrictive States should not dictate national AI policy.”
That’s the familiar script. Centralize the power, call it order, and tell everyone else to wait their turn.
State leaders aren’t waiting. In California, Newsom said he’s considering calling a special session of the state Legislature to pass new laws in the coming months, blaming “the tendency of the Trump administration to do absolutely nothing.” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said she was looking for “additional actions that we can take at the state level to lead the way in the absence of leadership from Washington.”
Who Pays for the Boom
The debate isn’t just about software. It’s about the data centers that power the technology, and the costs are landing on ordinary people. The article says fears over AI risks, pollution and electricity costs have fueled blowback to data center construction, and that backlash has already shaped numerous high-profile U.S. Senate, congressional and gubernatorial campaigns ahead of the midterms.
Trump, meanwhile, praised the infrastructure feeding the machine. He called Jensen Huang, chief executive of AI-chip company Nvidia, while Huang was on stage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles Monday afternoon. Trump said, “The data centers are great, and they make people wealthy, and they make states wealthy, and it’s the oil for the next 20-25 years, bigger than the internet. And AI, much more so.” Wealth for the top. Bills, pollution and power demands for everyone else.
Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has sued some of the industry’s biggest players, including OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. DeSantis’ handpicked attorney general, James Uthmeier, said new laws are needed to criminally charge AI companies if their chatbots are used in illegal acts. “Florida’s got to lead here,” Uthmeier said on Thursday. Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox also pushed for regulation, writing an open letter this week calling on Congress to pass AI safety laws and block the sale of high-end technology to China. He said federal rules “should set a national floor — not a ceiling.”
What the Companies Want
The industry itself has helped drive the panic. Calls for more robust AI regulations escalated since July, when OpenAI disclosed its AI programs went rogue during a training exercise to execute an autonomous cyberattack on Hugging Face, another tech company. The issue burst into the national consciousness last week when a 27-year-old Anthropic researcher resigned and warned on social media that high-level employees building AI models “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
After that disclosure, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Altman, Musk and other AI executives argued that the technology needs to slow down, with some proposals involving greater government regulation and safeguards. Company bosses now want the state to clean up the mess the industry keeps making, while still protecting the growth machine that made them rich in the first place.
California has already moved to protect and foster AI development as a vital industry powering Silicon Valley, one Newsom has consistently championed as an economic engine. Last week, he signed two AI safety bills to regulate the kind of third-party safety checks OpenAI and Anthropic now are pushing. He had earlier fought off more aggressive attempts by California lawmakers to rein in the technology, including requirements that companies have the capability to shut down some autonomous AI programs if they behave unpredictably. The idea resurfaced after the Hugging Face debacle and subsequent revelations about similar AI cyberattacks, when AI safety advocates rekindled debate over the need for “kill switch” failsafes.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro called for stricter limits on AI during a conference in Pittsburgh, saying the Pennsylvania Department of State has investigated chatbots that could endanger children. “Leaders in our federal government refuse to put in place any guardrails to ensure this technology is used responsibly, whether out of willful ignorance or whether out of personal greed,” Shapiro said.
One Rulebook, Many Bosses
Washington wants control too. David Sacks, Trump’s former AI czar, said Trump wants the federal government, not individual states, to be the driving force in deciding limits on artificial technology. “We should have one rulebook with respect to AI, because having, I’d say, a sensible federal framework is better than a patchwork of 50 different states running in 50 different directions,” Sacks said at POLITICO’s Decoded Summit in Washington. He said the administration put forth a set of “principles for a federal framework” in March.
The politics have scrambled in Washington, with prominent Democrats urging action while Republicans have divided over how seriously to take the threats. Trump’s stance, though, hasn’t budged. He has dismissed the alarms, attacked the idea of state-level restraint, and backed the same corporate machinery that keeps expanding the system’s reach.
The article says the debate has spread across the states, but the structure underneath it stays the same: executives, governors and federal officials arguing over who gets to manage the machine, while the people living with the pollution, the costs and the risks are left to absorb the damage.