Ed Ludlow

You do have a large number of other lawmakers who are seeking to rein in specific areas.

Some are worried more about the Doomer issue.

Others are worried about privacy.

Others still are worried about copyright.

And so far, we do not have anything comprehensive at the federal level.

And in the spirit that space abhors a vacuum, this is why we are seeing at the state level, both in Republican states and Democratic states,

legislators and governors moving in to try to impose some order on a system that they see as both economically significant, but also potentially perilous to voters and consumers.

And we are hearing from Ron DeSantis of Florida, Sarah Huckabee Sanders in Arkansas, and then even here in Washington, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a one-time ally, but now really at odds with President Donald Trump.

favoring state autonomy when it comes to regulating this new technology.

So it'll be interesting to see how this plays out and whether they do more to articulate a vision for regulating artificial intelligence at the federal level, as opposed to just saying why the state level rules on a patchwork basis are bad right now.

Mike Shepard, breaking it down, we thank you.

Let's continue the conversation.

We can head out to Sarah Olam, VP and Senior Fellow of the Technology Policy Institute.

From your perspective, is it better to have technology policy from a state level on AI or federal?

Sarah, the mechanism of an EO is not that surprising if you look at the prior initiatives of this White House.

In November, a big push by the White House on Congress to include a federal moratorium on state AI laws in a particular piece of legislation.

That effort not successful.

Explain why that was important, please.

Sarah, I want to push it forward a little bit of what actually is necessary, because it's all very well and good saying we don't want it from a state level, but many would harp back to what happened with social media, where ultimately the big companies were left to regulate themselves because no federal policy was ever enacted.

Do you have optimism that there will be some rules of the road, some guardrails from a federal perspective, or will it just be pushed back on a state level?