Meghan McCarty Carino

This is sort of like what made the whole social media era possible.

But there's a lot of speculation that this, you know, Section 230, as it's known, might not apply to chatbot outputs.

Tell us more about, you know, what this would mean.

Definitely something that we will be watching closely.

But now we want to dig into this conflict between the Trump administration and states over regulating AI.

This is something that we talked about before this Trump executive order happened because the Trump administration had been trying and failing to push a ban on state-level AI laws through Congress.

In December, President Trump signed an executive order blocking states from enforcing their regulation of AI.

which at this point is pretty voluminous, as we have discussed.

You know, the majority of states have some sort of AI law and some new ones are going into effect this year.

Maria, you've been following up on this.

How exactly does this EO attempt to stop state AI laws?

Right, because the idea, the language in the executive order is that, you know, government agencies should check the most onerous and excessive state laws in favor of a minimally burdensome, uniform national policy framework, which, of course, we do not have at the moment.

And I'm assuming is something that would take quite a lot of negotiating and the kind of thing that we...

haven't necessarily seen our lawmakers do a ton of in recent years.

Yeah, so you say inevitably challenged.

We have a number of new laws taking effect all over the map.

California has several governing safeguards for AI chatbots, exposure of minors to sexual content, protocols for how chatbots should deal with users expressing suicidal thoughts.

There's new laws taking effect in Texas and Illinois.

What kinds of signals are we seeing from states about how they might respond, if at all, to this executive order?

All right, well, now to the hot new accessory that you can't get in Europe or Canada, apparently.