Senate strips 10-year state AI law moratorium from reconciliation bill 99-1

The US Senate voted 99–1 to strip a proposed ten-year moratorium on state enforcement of artificial-intelligence laws from the tax-and-spending package that became the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Senate Commerce Committee chair Ted Cruz had inserted the provision, arguing that a single federal standard was preferable to a state-by-state patchwork of AI regulation. Only Senator Thom Tillis voted to keep it.

A bipartisan group led by Marsha Blackburn and Maria Cantwell, joined by Ed Markey and Susan Collins, offered the amendment that removed the moratorium. Their argument was that a blanket federal preemption would nullify state laws already protecting children online and governing consumer data, deepfakes and algorithmic discrimination, before Congress had passed any equivalent federal statute of its own. Opposition to the original provision was unusually broad for a Washington fight over AI: it drew objections from all 50 state legislatures, roughly 40 state attorneys general across both parties, and 17 Republican governors, all treating it as an assertion of federal authority over ground — child safety, consumer protection — that states had long occupied themselves.

The reconciliation bill passed without the moratorium and was signed into law on 4 July 2025. The vote settled nothing about the underlying disagreement: Congress had neither passed a federal AI statute nor durably blocked states from legislating, so the patchwork Cruz had wanted to avoid kept growing through 2025, with California’s SB 53 and New York’s RAISE Act among the state laws that followed. The administration returned to the same goal by a different route five months later, when Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to challenge state AI laws in court rather than seeking a legislative preemption a second time.