Big Tech’s desperate last push at AI regulation

For months, Big Tech’s Washington lobbyists have chased after the holy grail of pro-AI legislation: preemption. This would be a comprehensive federal law, passed in Congress and signed by the president, applying one set of AI rules across the entire country and overriding the legally messy state-by-state approach to regulation. For months, lobbyists have run into roadblocks and incurred nationwide political blowback, and they now face the possibility that after the midterms, Congress will flip to hostile Democrats unwilling to work with them. But their final, most desperate attempt at preemption is coming with new baggage, related to an entirely different fight in Congress that predates the public launch of ChatGPT: child safety. Earlier this week, reports leaked that the White House had told child safety groups and Big Tech companies that it would endorse a slate of children’s online safety laws backed by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), the coauthor of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) , as part of an overall preemption package. While the issue of online safety does meaningfully overlap with AI, it’s only one facet of a much larger, complex set of issues that would need to be addressed in a truly comprehensive law: frontier model safety, discrimination, environmental impact, and so forth. …