In a stunning 99-1 vote that could only happen in Washington, the Senate just handed Big Tech its biggest legislative victory in decades. Senator Marsha Blackburn's amendment to strip the AI regulation moratorium from Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" passed with the kind of bipartisan enthusiasm usually reserved for naming post offices. But don't mistake this for a victory against corporate power—this is corporate power winning so completely that even its opponents are voting for it.
Welcome to the AI Wild West, where the sheriffs just threw their badges in the dust and walked away.
The Great AI Regulation Heist
The moratorium would have banned states from regulating artificial intelligence for 10 years, creating a federal-level regulatory vacuum while major AI companies, including Alphabet's Google and OpenAI, have expressed support for Congress taking AI regulation out of the hands of states to free innovation from a panoply of differing requirements. Translation: Big Tech wanted to eliminate the messy complexity of dealing with 50 different state laws and instead operate in a regulatory paradise where federal inaction equals corporate freedom.
The letter, provided to the Tech Brief ahead of its publication Tuesday, bears the signatures of 260 lawmakers — half of them Republicans, almost half Democrats and one independent — from all 50 states. Even Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a staunch Trump ally, posted on X earlier this month that, when she signed the House version of the bill, she didn't realize it would keep states from creating their own AI laws.
When Marjorie Taylor Greene is accidentally on the right side of a tech policy issue, you know something has gone seriously wrong.
This isn't just about regulatory theory—it's about real protections that real people depend on. A Brennan Center analysis found that the moratorium would lead to 149 existing state laws being overturned. At least 45 states and US territories introduced AI-related legislation last year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Thirty-one states, along with Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, passed legislation or adopted resolutions that regulate AI in 2024.
Tennessee's ELVIS Act, which gives people the right to control the use of their image and voice to curb deepfakes, would be toast. California's AI safety requirements? Gone. Laws preventing AI discrimination in hiring? Vanished. State laws that impose any substantive restrictions or requirements on AI models will be considered unenforceable under the decade-long moratorium.
We're not talking about eliminating bureaucratic red tape. We're talking about eliminating the only functioning layer of AI governance that actually exists in America.
The tech industry's favorite boogeyman made its predictable appearance. AI and tech companies like Google and Microsoft have argued that the moratorium is necessary to keep the industry competitive with China. OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, Chris Lehane, wrote on LinkedIn: "While not someone I'd typically quote, Vladimir Putin has said that whoever prevails will determine the direction of the world going forward".
Nothing says "we need deregulation" quite like invoking Putin's thoughts on global AI dominance. This is the same industry that spent years telling us they could self-regulate, then delivered us algorithmic bias, deepfake pornography, and AI systems that can't distinguish between a mushroom and a nuclear reactor.
The argument essentially boils down to: "We need to be as reckless as our adversaries to beat our adversaries." It's the regulatory equivalent of saying we need to abandon food safety standards because other countries don't inspect their meat.
The political theater around this issue has been genuinely entertaining. Senate Republicans were aware of the concern regarding the Senate's reconciliation Byrd rule, which bans "nonbudgetary" provisions in the reconciliation process. The Byrd Rule exists to prevent exactly this kind of policy smuggling—cramming sweeping regulatory changes into budget bills.
The Senate parliamentarian ruled last week that the AI provision in the Senate version of the legislation does not have to be subject to a rule that otherwise would require a 60-vote threshold. So the provision that would have eliminated AI regulation survived parliamentary scrutiny, only to be killed by a near-unanimous Senate vote.
In other words, Congress had the legal authority to deregulate AI completely, but chose not to. This might be the first time in recent memory that procedural rules were less permissive than actual political will.
What makes this vote particularly fascinating is the strange bedfellows it created. Critics as varied as Marjorie Taylor Greene and the NAACP have come out against the rule. When you've got the progressive left and the MAGA right agreeing on tech policy, you're either witnessing a miracle or a catastrophe.
The 99-1 vote suggests this was one of those rare moments when political theater aligned with actual policy sense. Even in our polarized political climate, preventing Big Tech from gutting state-level AI protections managed to find consensus.
The Senate's overwhelming vote to strip the AI moratorium represents something genuinely unusual in American politics: a bipartisan rejection of corporate overreach. "Congress has just shown it can't do a lot in this space," Larry Norden, the vice president of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center, told NBC News. "To take the step to say we are not doing anything, and we're going to prevent the states from doing anything is, as far as I know, unprecedented".
This isn't about anti-innovation sentiment or technophobic fear-mongering. It's about maintaining the basic principle that powerful technologies need oversight, especially when the companies developing them have repeatedly demonstrated they can't be trusted to regulate themselves.
The AI industry will undoubtedly frame this as a setback for American competitiveness. In reality, it's a victory for the kind of thoughtful, state-level experimentation that has historically driven American innovation policy. When federal lawmakers can't or won't act, states serve as laboratories of democracy—not obstacles to progress.
For once, Congress chose democratic governance over corporate convenience. That's worth celebrating, even if it only happened because the alternative was so obviously terrible that even Marjorie Taylor Greene could see it coming.
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