Key Takeaways

  • The White House on Friday proposed a national framework for regulating artificial intelligence, calling on Congress to prioritize legislation that would supersede conflicting state AI laws that it says "impose undue burdens on businesses."
  • The plan focuses on several priorities, including streamlining federal permitting processes for AI data centers, addressing intellectual property issues related to AI model training, and ensuring the workforce is equipped for the AI era through skills development programs. The administration favors a light-touch regulatory approach, urging Congress to avoid creating new federal rulemaking bodies for AI and instead rely on existing agencies and industry-led standards to support technology development and deployment.
  • "Importantly, this framework can only succeed if it applies uniformly across the United States," the White House said in a statement. "A patchwork of conflicting state laws will harm American innovation and weaken our leadership in the global AI race."

Deep Dive

The legislative plan comes just over three months after Trump signed an executive order aimed at preventing "burdensome" state AI laws and promoting a national policy framework. That order directed the administration to work with federal lawmakers to "ensure a national standard of minimal burden—rather than 50 separate state standards."

The administration's latest announcement also comes amid growing public concern over AI's potential harms, from deepfake scams to workforce displacement.

"The framework is thin on substance and offers few surprises, but its throughline remains consistent—protecting the profits of big tech companies, not the interests of ordinary people," Ben Winters, AI and privacy director at the Washington-based consumer advocacy group Consumer Federation of America, said in an email.

Earlier this week, Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn unveiled a sweeping AI discussion draft that would require U.S. public companies and other entities to disclose AI's impact on their workforce on a quarterly basis, among other provisions.

"Today, the Trump administration has provided us with a roadmap for AI development, and I look forward to working with my colleagues to codify the President's agenda into law, protect the American people, and unleash AI innovation," Blackburn said in a statement.

The White House plan calls on Congress to "use non-regulatory means to ensure that existing education programs and workforce training and support programs, including apprenticeships, meaningfully incorporate AI training." The proposal also seeks to expand federal research into "AI-driven task-level workforce reallocation trends" to inform policies supporting the U.S. workforce.

The administration also urged Congress to:

  • Provide AI resources for small businesses—such as grants, tax incentives, and technical assistance programs—to support broader AI deployment;
  • Consider allowing copyright holders to collectively negotiate compensation from AI service providers without antitrust liability;
  • Strengthen existing enforcement efforts against impersonation scams and fraud enabled by AI; and
  • Consider establishing a federal framework to protect individuals from unauthorized dissemination or commercial exploitation of AI-generated "digital replicas of their voice, likeness, or other identifiable attributes," while providing clear exemptions for parody, satire, news reporting, and other expressive works protected by the First Amendment.

The administration said Congress should prioritize preempting state AI laws that "impose undue burdens" to ensure a "national standard of minimal burden," while respecting "key principles of federalism." Under the plan, federal law should take the lead in areas such as setting AI development and testing standards, and cover requirements that could impose extraterritorial obligations on businesses operating across state lines.

"The administration recommends that Congress explicitly preempt state laws that conflict with these federal standards, while allowing states to enforce laws in limited areas such as child safety, specific local licensing, and zoning," the document states.

The White House effort underscores the urgency of advancing U.S. AI leadership, said Matt Schruers, CEO of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a trade group that lobbies on behalf of major tech companies including Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Google.

"An overly restrictive approach that is not calibrated to risk could invite legal challenges and forfeit opportunities to enhance U.S. competitiveness," Schruers said in an emailed statement.

Winters, however, argued that some of the administration's stated goals—such as protecting people from AI scams and curbing minors' data misuse—are undermined by the framework's "pro-AI" stance on preemption and enforcement.

"We need to see them put real money behind protections—increasing funding for consumer protection agencies at the federal and state levels," he said. "So far, all they've done is cut and weaken those agencies."