Is it me or does this seem like naked corruption at its worst? These tech CEOs hang out at the White House and donate to superfluous causes and suddenly the executive is protecting their interests. This does nothing to protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes.
> This does nothing to protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes.
Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?
Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption, which has in turn created millions of jobs that didn't exist before and led to the US running the world's largest economy.
We regulate medicine, nuclear technology, television, movies, monopolies, energy, financial services, etc. because these things can be harmful if left solely to the market. Americans value honest work, dignity, prosperity and equal opportunity. Innovation is useful in so far as it enables our values - regulation is not counter to Americans interests, it protects them.
Sure. And this is not that. This says: before we begin to think about our policy let's make sure to remove any barriers for Mr. Altman and friends so that they don't get sucked down with their Oracle branded boat anchor.
If this had any whiff of actually shedding light on these needed regulations the root OP wouldn't have said what they did. But for now I'm going to head over to Polymarket and see if there are any bets I can place on Trump's kids being appointed to the OpenAI board.
Not true that US is 100% gas pedal constantly on innovation. You’re forgetting labor reform movements and the service switch away from industry in the last few decades. Also the de-science-ing of the current admin has vastly reduced our innovative capacity, as well as the virtual decapitation of brain drain. Those next generation of brightest immigrants certainly aren’t coming here to deal with ICE, and that’s been the source of half the great minds in our country throughout its history, gone because of racism.
I kind of doubt American scientists will leave en masse to go elsewhere. Their options are only Europe, the UK, or China. Most will not be willing to give up the salaries or the resources available to scientists in the USA, even with the current administration, to go live in strongly hierarchical academic systems that they don’t know how to navigate. Especially not for a 30% salary reduction (or more if they go someplace like France or Italy).
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption
Arguably true, but it's also been way ahead of the pack (people tend to forget this) on protection for organized labor, social safety net entitlements, and regulation of harmful industrial safety and environmental externalities.
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption
Until that "innovation and disruption" threatens any established player, at which point they run crying to the government to grease some palms. China is innovating and disrupting the entire energy sector via renewables and battery storage while the US is cowering in the corner trying to flaccidly resuscitate the corpse of the coal industry.
The case against this EO is not “banning new technology”. It’s not allowing the federal government to ban any state regulation. And states having the power to make their own rules is maybe the most American value.
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption, which has in turn created millions of jobs that didn't exist before and led to the US running the world's largest economy.
Where did you get the idea that this was the cause that created millions of jobs and lead to the US running the world's largest economy, and not say - the knock-on effects of the US joining WW2 relatively late and unscathed, making it the only major world power left with a functioning enough industrial complex to export to war-ravaged Europe?
I see your point, but that is definitely not the only cause of American economic dominance. The U.S. has been the largest economy by GDP since ca 1900 – i.e. before the wars.
The patent system. I know someone will respond detailing why the patent system is pro-business, but it is objectively government regulation that puts restrictions on new technology, so it's proof that regulation of that sort is at least an American tradition if not fully an "American value".
Patents and trademarks are the only ways to create legal monopolies. They are/were intended to reward innovation but despite good intentions are abused.
Intellectual property restrictions cause harm even when used as intended. They are an extreme rest restriction on market activity and I believe they cause more harm than good.
Not exactly. For example, Major League Baseball has been granted an anti-trust exemption by the US Supreme Court, because they said it was not a business. In some cases in which firms have been found guilty of violating the anti-trust laws, they were fined amounts minuscule in relation to the profits they gained by operating the monopoly. Various governments in the US outsource public services to private monopolies, and the results have sometimes amounted to a serious restraint of trade. The chicanery goes back a long way. For the first decade or so after the passage of the Sherman Act, it was not used against the corporate monopolies that it was written to limit; it was invoked only against labor unions trying to find a way to get a better deal out of the firms operating company stores and company towns etc, etc.
Then Teddy Roosevelt, the so-called trust-buster, invoked it under the assumption that he could tell the difference between good and bad monopolies and that he had the power to leave the good monopolies alone. 120 years later, we are in the same sorry situation.
Patents, trademarks, copyright, deeds and other similar concepts are part of what makes capitalism what it is, without them capitalism will not work because they are the mechanisms that enforce private property.
Maybe it should be. The system here in the US has produced some great innovations at the cost of great misery among the non-wealthy. At a time when technology promises an easier life, it only seems to benefit the wealthy, while trying to discard everyone else. The light at the end of the tunnel is a 1%-er about to laughingly crush you beneath their wheels.
I don't think this is the strongest argument. Every technological revolution so far has initially benefited the wealthy and taken a generation or two for its effects to lift the masses out of previous levels of poverty, but ultimately each one has.
To me the stronger argument about AI is that this revolution won't. And that's because this one is not really about productivity or even about capital investment in things that people nominally would want (faster transport, cheaper cotton, home computers). This one is about ending revolution once and for all; it's not about increeasing the wealth of the wealthy, it's about being the first to arrive at AGI and thus cementing that wealth disparity for all perpetuity. It's the endgame.
I don't know if that's true, but that's to me the argument as to why this one is exceptional and why the capitalist argument for American prosperity is inapplicable in this case.
I don't know about for all perpetuity. If history has shown, anyone that reaches the pinnacle eventually becomes complacent, technology improves by becoming faster/cheaper/smaller. That just means it is prime to always be susceptible to a new something coming along that stands on the shoulders of what came before without having to pay for it. They start where the current leader fought to achieve.
I don’t know about that. The poor from just about every other country in the world seem desperate to live in America. While American capitalism has many faults, oppressing the bottom quintile is not one of them. The US median income is consistently top ten globally.
Median income doesn't tell much if you don't factor in the cost of living. My salary sucks compared to what I would earn in America, but when I factor in things like free healthcare, daycare and higher level education, I'm better off here.
> Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?
Copyright law is another counter-example to your argument. But somehow? that’s no longer a concern if you have enough money. I guess the trick is to steal from literally everyone so that no one entity can claim any measurable portion of the output as damages.
I’ve always thought Copyright should be way shorter than it is, but it’s suspect that we’re having a coming to Jesus moment about IP with all the AI grifting going on.
Copyright has nothing to do with banning technology. It is a set of rules around a particular kind of property rights.
There are things you can do with technology that are banned as a result of copyright protections, but the underlying technologies are not banned, only the particular use of them is.
The question isn’t the jobs created but how have workers benefited from increased productivity? They haven’t materially since late 1970s. That’s when the American labor movement began its decline. Innovation isn’t what helps workers. The gains from innovation have to be wrenched from the hands of the ruling class through organized resistance.
I think your take is historically accurate. Although one does wonder how long we'll be able to get away with keeping the pedal to the metal. It might be worth taking a moment to install a steering wheel. Rumor has it there are hazards about.
This is a tribute system, way past lobbying. Lobbying is cheap, Senators can be bought off for 5-figure sums. CEOs pay lobbyists so they don't have to meet with them personally. What's happening now involves CEOs appearing at political events and lobbying the president personally, to the tune of millions of dollars in declared "donations" for "ballroom construction", in exchange for security guarantees for their business empires.
Lobbying is tightly regulated, and the FEC really does keep a close eye.
This is just flat out bribery, using the thinnest of legal fig leaves. Which would not possibly pass muster if he hadn't also packed the court with supporters.
Is it you? I mean, the guy started his term by launching a scam coin along with his wife. He hates the United States and sees it as just something to exploit for financial gain and power. That's it. That's literally all there is to all of his actions.
It is definitely naked corruption. Lobbying was always around, but I would say that with this administration things are a lot more transactional and a lot more in the open. Companies like Palantir and Anduril and others are being gifted contracts all over the place - that’s money we taxpayers are losing.
It's hard to say what they're actually qualified to do but they went from receiving 1 or 2 contracts per year in the early 2020s for a few 10s of millions and I think one larger $200M one to this since Trump was reelected;
The Marine Corps I-CsUAS award is explicitly described as an IDIQ with a maximum dollar value of $642M over 10 years -- though it could be much less -- and reporting indicates it was competitively procured with 10 offerors. It wasn't "gifted"/"no-bid"
Also: $642M spread over 10 years is roughly $64M/year at the ceiling, and ceilings are often not fully used. That scale is not remotely unusual for a program-of-record counter-UAS capability if the government believes the threat is persistent. (Which it does.)
The rest are similarly mundane and justifiable.
Here's what would be weird: Repeated sole-source awards where a competitive approach is feasible, implausible technical scope relative to deliverables, unjustified pricing, or political intervention affecting downselects. I don't see any of that here. (But, okay, let's not talk about Palantir, lol.)
> protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes
So where is this coalition that’s organized to actually make this real?
Software engineers are allergic to unionization (despite the recent id win) and 100% of capital owners (this is NOT business owner and operators I’m talking about LPs and Fund Managers) are in support of labor automation as a priority, the same people also run every government and overwhelmingly select the politicians available to vote for, so who will fund and lead your advocacy?
Game developers are subject to much more abuse than the average software engineering job, for less pay. It's a different environment.
I'm open to the idea of guilds, but personally I do not want others negotiating for me with the type of work I do, I'd prefer it to be a contract between me, my employer and nothing else. Unions aren't always a net benefit for every industry.
Of course, with AI going the way it is, collective bargaining might become more attractive in our field. But institutions can be slow to catch up and not everyone always agrees with the outcome. Personally, if I worked in Hollywood, I'd be upset about the kind of anti-AI scaremongering and regulation taking place in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA.
The US was founded on crime. We are a colonial imperial country with a penchant for using racism and religion in order to maintain a certain lifestyle for white supremacists.
Slavery was really not that long ago, we are still actively invading countries and murdering people for oil, and we help bankroll straight up genocide in regions such as Darfur and Palestine.
People had nearly a decade of experience with Donald Trump as a known political entity and decades of receipts and lawsuits prior to 2016 to speak to his amoral and corrupt nature. If they didn't know exactly what they were buying into they were idiots. He isn't exactly a master manipulator.
Also, The first time Trump was elected, the majority of voters went for Hillary Clinton. Second time, it was still 49% versus 48% for Kamala Harris. The majority of Americans have never voted for Donald Trump nor ever supported him.
Question number one. Is dominance really a necessary part of a country's existence? Can't you just have peaceful relations and supportive relationships with other countries to live in harmony, when artificial intelligence brings benefits to all countries, not just the USA? Can't you build on the technological foundations that have been laid to create sustainable development for your society?
The desire for more. To have more than others, is a key problem that generates unhealthy politics. Unhealthy foreign policy towards other countries. In your pursuit of being first in everything. Being first in everything, preventing the development of other countries, holding onto technologies for yourself. You create an imbalance. You create an imbalance in the global economy, in politics, in the social sphere, and in the social environment.
Isn't there an alternative to having sustainable development? Built on the principles of mutual support and focused not on dominance, but on collaboration between peaceful states. Between peaceful states.
Yes, dominance is preferred.
Countries’ resources aren’t evenly distributed, and this fact determines foreign policy more than anything else.
There’s no world govt or global authority. Every country must look after its own interests.
Having every country cooperate requires trusting some entity as a global enforcer, one that wont abuse their unchecked power. Obviously, america has played this role since ww2 but not without plenty of mistakes and oversights.
We as humans haven’t found an alternative to this yet.
Any company dumb enough to try to use this to ignore actual state law will get what they deserve. No state court will give them a pass when they claim an EO has any force of law or that it was reasonable to rely on it.
Even given the current state of things (I’m a lawyer, so well aware) I would put money on this
Like most of what Trump does it's 1000% emo and also very stupid. It's proudly anti-democratic and fundamentally disrespectful of American values.
People fall for it because fear of foreign rivals, frustration with a regulatory patchwork, and anti‑“ideological” backlash make a centralized, tough‑sounding fix emotionally satisfying. Big Tech and national‑security rhetoric also create an illusion that “dominance” equals safety and prosperity, short‑circuiting careful federalism and due process.
I imagine it’s a nod to the way the stated goal would normally be pursued, but in this case is not.
It sounds like a good idea to establish a uniform national policy! And the federal government can do that (although only for the very specific purposes spelled out in the Constitution). The right way to do that is to pass a law through both houses of Congress, and the president to sign it into law. Maybe the law even specifies a broad framework and authorizes the executive branch to dial in the specific details (although the court seems to be souring on that kind of thing too).
The god-king proclaiming a brand new framework governing a major new sector of the economy To Be So is.. not the normal way
That's the whole point. They aren't law, and they were (probably) never meant to be so far-reaching, and yet the clear purpose of this Executive Order is to tell the states what laws they can enact. The EO doesn't have the legal power to do that directly, but it clearly outlines the intention to withdraw federal funding from states that refuse to toe the line.
> The order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to create an “AI Litigation Task Force” within 30 days whose "sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws" that clash with the Trump administration's vision for light-touch regulation.
The EO isn't about Federal Preemption. Trump's not creating a law to preempt states. So a question about how Federal Preemption is relevant is on point.
> My Administration must act with the Congress to ensure that there is a minimally burdensome national standard — not 50 discordant State ones. …
Sounds like leaving it up to Congress! But then the administration vows to thwart state laws despite the vacuum of no extant preemption, so effectively imposing a type of supposed Executive preemption:
> Until such a national standard exists, however, it is imperative that my Administration takes action to check the most onerous and excessive laws emerging from the States that threaten to stymie innovation.
So preemption link is relevant, I think; and at any rate, helpful to give background to those not familiar with the concept, which constitutes the field against which this is happening.
Also why are they small federal government states rights for things but big federal government centralized power for this? It doesn't make sense to me.
It's right in the text of the EO: they intend to argue that the state laws are preempted by existing federal regulations, and they also direct the creation of new regulations to create preemption if necessary, specifically calling on the FCC and FTC to make new federal rules to preempt disfavored state laws. Separately it talks about going to Congress for new laws but mostly this lays out an attempt to do it with executive action as much as possible, both through preemption and by using funding to try to coerce the states.
There's a reasonable argument that nationwide regulation is the more efficient and proper path here but I think it's pretty obvious that the intent is to make toothless "regulation" simply to trigger preemption. You don't have to do much wondering to figure out the level of regulation that David Sacks is looking for.
I think the message between the lines is what's important, and it goes like this:
"We in the executive branch have an agreement with the Supreme Court allowing us to bypass congress and enact edicts. We will do this by sending the Justice Department any state law that gets in the way of our donors, sending the layup to our Republican Supreme Court, who will dunk on the States for us and nullify their law."
We don't have to go through the motions of pretending we still live in a constitutional republic, it's okay to talk frankly about reality as it exists.
It goes deeper than that - the Supreme Council will issue non-binding "guidance" on the "shadow docket", so that when/if the fascists/destructionists [0] lose the Presidency, they can go back to being obstructionists weaponizing high-minded ideals in bad faith. As a libertarian, the way I see it is we can disagree politically on what constitutes constructive solutions, but it's time to unite, stop accepting any of the fascists' nonsense, and take back the fucking government - full support for the one remaining mainstream party that at least nominally represents the interests of the United States, while demanding they themselves stop preemptively appeasing the fascists. The Libertarian, Green, or even new parties can step up as the opposition. Pack the courts with judges that believe in America first and foremost, make DC and PR states to mitigate the fascists' abuse of the Senate, and so on. After we've stopped the hemorrhaging, work on fundamental things like adopting ranked pairs voting instead of this plurality trash.
[0] I'd be willing to call them something else if they picked an honest name for themselves - they are most certainly not "conservatives"
This is quite literally going to lead to a Supreme Court case about Federal Preemption. Bondi will challenge some CA law, they will lose and appeal until they get to the Supreme Court. I don't have any grace to give people at this point, you have to be willingly turning a blind eye if you do not see where this will end up.
Federal preemption requires federal law (aka laws written by congress). How else would it get to the supreme court?
The EO mentions congress passing new law a few times in addition to an executive task force to look into challenging state laws based on constitutional violations or federal statues. That's the only way they'd get in front of a judge.
If the plan is for the executive to invent new laws it's not mapped out in this EO
> Federal preemption requires federal law (aka laws written by congress). How else would it get to the supreme court?
1. No federal preemption currently. (No federal law, therefore no regulation on the matter that should preempt.)
2. State passes and enforces law regarding AI.
3. Trump directs Bondi to challenge the state law on nonsense grounds.
4. In the lawsuit, the state points out that there is no federal preemption; oh yeah, 10th Amendment; and that the administration's argument is nonsense.
5. The judge, say Eileen Cannon, invalidates the state law.
6. Circuit Court reverses.
7. Administration seeks and immediately gets a grant of certiorari — and the preemption matter is in the Supreme Court.
> passing new law … only way they'd get it in front of a judge.
The EO directs Bondi to investigate whether, and argue that, existing executive regulations (presumably on other topics) preempt state legislation.
Regardless, the EO makes it a priority to find and take advantage of some way to challenge and possibly invalidate state laws on the subject. This is a new take on preemption: creation of a state-law vacuum on the subject, through scorched-earth litigation (how Trumpian!), despite an utter absence of federal legislation on the matter.
the Task Force can try to challenge state AI laws. they can file whatever lawsuits they want. they will probably lose most of their suits, because there's very little ground for challenging state AI regulations.
Someone commented that (one of?) the reason that Trump is using EOs so much is probably because is not willing (or able) to actually get deals on in the legislature to pass his policies (or what passes for policy with him).
I think the Administration is likely to get its toys taken away soon.
the Major Questions Doctrine, the end of Chevron deference, the mandate for Article III courts from Jarkesy, have been building towards this for a while. the capstone in this program of weakening the administrative state, overturning Humphrey's Executor when Trump v. Slaughter is decided, will likely revive the Intelligible Principle Doctrine, as Justice Gorsuch has hinted. the same trend is apparent in the IEEPA tariffs case, where non-delegation got a lot of airtime.
EOs lose a lot of their punch when the Executive's delegated rulemaking and adjudication powers are returned back to their rightful owners in the other two branches.
But they rule in his favor more often than not. They gave him freaking immunity for any crimes he may commit. This alone enables him to disregard the law without any fear of repercussions.
> This alone enables him to disregard the law without any fear of repercussions.
That does not apply to his lackeys though (unless there's a preemptive pardon).
If (!) there's a change in the President eventually, there needs to be a reckoning for everyone that didn't push back on instructions/orders (including all the folks down the line who are blowing up (alleged) drug boats).
I fear by reducing control over executive power to one, squishy standard like the Intelligible Principle Doctrine will let SCOTUS pick and choose which laws have intelligible principles. When conservatives are in power, suddenly all laws will have them. And swing back when liberals are in control.
Each EO tests the waters a bit more with what the public and other branches will tolerate. As we’ve seen with numerous orders already, Congress and business will comply early because they think it will benefit them.
Trump thinks himself a king. He acts like it. He’s attempting to normalize his behavior. He can’t deal with the legislature because it turns out white supremacy isn’t that popular. Who knew?
I think the GOP, the right, etc. do propaganda very well. And they’re good at spinning scandals into things their voter base wants to hear. Or just burying them in a way that makes it hard for their base to find.
Even the centrist TV networks are still treating Trump like a normal president. News like the NYTimes does the same, while platforming horrible people in their op ed section.
Edit: anec-data - I have an embarrassing number of family members that voted for him. I asked why and the surprising common thing among all of them was they just didn’t know. The felonies, convictions, scandals, the racism and transphobia. They were just surprised. And they’re not very good at thinking critically about much of it.
Instead they’re voting for some nostalgia and the idea that they felt safer and more secure in their country when they were younger.
I once heard it said that Trump governs like a dictator because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is extremely unpopular and his party holds one of the smallest house majorities ever.
GOP is a party captured by the very wealthy. It’s minority rule because of certain elites’ trillion dollar plans to control all three branches of government and the courts have come to fruition after decades in the works.
After Nixon a lot of lessons were learned, on how to handle scandals and how to ram unpopular policy down America’s throat.
There is a very vocal opposition to Trump. However, by almost any way you can present "popularity" of a president - be it approval ratings, polling figures, popular vote, electoral vote, etc. - he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.
It's easy to get caught in an echo chamber of like-minded individuals and assume everyone disagrees with his policies - but that is far from reality.
> he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.
Published today: "Trump's approval rating on the economy hits record low 31%"[1]
> President Trump's approval rating on his longtime political calling card — the economy — has sunk to 31%, the lowest it has been across both of his terms as president, according to a new survey from The Associated Press-NORC.
"Trump's Approval Rating Drops to 36%, New Second-Term Low" [2]
> his all-time low was 34% in 2021, at the end of his first term after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The man is only two points above where he was when every reputable institution on the planet was running away from him as fast as possible, and he was nearly convicted in the senate. Less than a year into the term.
Yeah it'd be a wild view to call him among the most popular. But he is actually [0] pretty standard for a modern president - probably the least popular [1] but he doesn't stand out that much among the Bush/Biden/Obama polling except that it appears people understood what he was going to do before he entered office instead of discovering it on the way through.
And there is an interesting argument that most modern presidential approvals have more to do with the media environment and better visibility on just how bad their policies are.
[1] I'd argue better than that loser Bush who was probably the worst president in modern US history and who's polling showed it, but for the sake of keeping things simple.
> And there is an interesting argument that most modern presidential approvals have more to do with the media environment and better visibility on just how bad their policies are.
I think you can go further, the ratings are also heavily tied to things like gasoline prices and the overall economy, and generally things the president has little control over. So actually not much to do with their policies at all. I think Trump knows this and it's why he's done some strategically stupid things to the US fossil fuel industry in order to tactically bring down gasoline prices to juice his ratings.
This likely also explains the 2024 election, because it happened in the context of vast sums of money being sucked out of the economy as the fed tried to fight inflation. Incumbents globally got an absolute thrashing that year regardless of what their actual policies were.
> However, by almost any way you can present "popularity" of a president - be it approval ratings, polling figures, popular vote, electoral vote, etc. - he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.
You might want to look up those data yourself because uh he's actually unpopular in those metrics.
Approval - 42.5% [1]. Much better than Trump's love interest Biden's 37.1% [2] but being below 50% is unpopular.
Popular Vote / Electoral Vote - 49.8%, 312. I may need to tell you this so I will. 50% is greater than 49.8%; a majority of voters (nevermind the country) did not want Trump. As before, this is better than Biden's 306 and Trump1's 304 but worse than Obama2 (332), Obama1 (365) and in general 312 (57%) is nothing to write home about.
It's never been about principles of states rights. It's always about disliking specific national policies and spinning the argument to make it sound as if it's about a reasonable principle.
The regulation vs innovation framing is a false dichotomy here. Most developed economies have found that thoughtful regulation enables _sustainable_ innovation - see GDPR and data privacy innovation, or pharma regulations driving R&D.
For AI specifically, baseline standards around model documentation, data sourcing transparency, and compute auditing would actually help larger players (who can afford compliance) and reduce race-to-bottom dynamics that harm smaller developers.
Just like the last time Trump was president he is far from a traditional conservative regarding small government. People pretend the 2010 tea party is the same thing as Trump as some sort of gotcha, but he's never been that way. He's always been very assertive regarding expanding executive and federal power.
No one is surprised about that guy, those comments usually point out how "the 2010 tea party", and everyone else from the decades, if not centuries, of the conservative milieu, are suddenly all in on this.
I agree, the main reason is he has been very effective with his cult of personality to get most of the republican congressmen in line. They lose elections if they don't and politicians aren't known for sticking to their values once in power.
The actual small government republican congressmen like https://x.com/justinamash have been very critical of Trump's power grabs but he lost political favor doing so
> shall, in consultation with the Special Advisor for AI and Crypto
It's funny to me that they categorise AI and crypto together like this, two technologies that have nothing to do with each other (other than both being favoured by grifters).
More than anything, they need to match and then exceed Singapore's text and data mining exception for copyrighted works. I'll be happy to tell them how since I wrote several versions of it trying to balance all sides.
The minimum, though, is that all copyrighted works the supplier has legal access to can be copied, transformed arbitrarily, and used for training. And they can share those and transformed versions with anyone else who already has legal access to that data. And no contract, including terms of use, can override that. And they can freely scrape it but maybe daily limits imposed to avoid destructive scraping.
That might be enough to collect, preprocess, and share datasets like The Pile, RefinedWeb, uploaded content the host shares (eg The Stack, Youtube). We can do a lot with big models trained that way. We can also synthesize other data from them with less risk.
> Earlier this week, he reiterated that sentiment in a post on Truth Social, saying: “We are beating ALL COUNTRIES at this point in the race, but that won’t last long if we are going to have 50 States, many of them bad actors
It’s hard to tell if what he says is even relate to what he will do. A hardline on semiconductors to China faded this week when he needed some economic stimulation.
So when states without AI data centers seek to ameliorate tax and zoning obstacles, it won’t be Federal preemption in their way, but what benefits Trump.
In particular, the bulk of the substantial text of the order has a pretty clear culture war bend with all the talk about how truthful AI is. This is in large part a fight over the political leaning of AI models.
> Republicans earlier this year failed to pass a similar 10-year moratorium on state laws that regulate AI as part of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with the Senate voting 99-1 to remove that ban from the legislation. Trump’s order resurrects that effort, which failed after bipartisan pushback and Republican infighting, but as an order that lacks the force of law. [0]
> Trump has framed the need for comprehensive AI regulation as both a necessity for the technology’s development and as a means of preventing leftist ideology from infiltrating generative AI – a common conservative grievance among tech leaders such as Elon Musk.
On the other hand ..... Grok and others ...
From the party of "states rights" and "small government"
White House AI czar and Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks elaborated on the rationale for the executive order in a post on X.
Sacks argued that this domain of “interstate commerce” was “the type of economic activity that the Framers of the Constitution intended to reserve for the federal government to regulate.”
At the Oval Office signing ceremony, Sacks said, "We have 50 states running in 50 different directions. It just doesn't make sense."
I'd like to point out that the South was only a fan of States Rights exactly insofar as they let them do slavery. The millisecond it came to forcing Northern states to return escaped slaves, they suddenly weren't the same principled supporters of devolving and federating power. Funny how that works.
And just in case it wasn't clear enough already: one of the first acts of the Confederacy was to draft a provisional constitution which explicitly authorized slavery, and which prohibited either Congress or any state from passing laws to the contrary.
Many of the ills currently befalling the US can be traced to the New Deal era. Including, of course, an HN favorite: our system of employer-sponsored health insurance.
The "The U.S. government had established limits on wheat production, based on the acreage owned by a farmer, to stabilize wheat prices and supplies." seems like quite the federal overreach never mind the court decision.
> Sacks argued that this domain of “interstate commerce” was “the type of economic activity that the Framers of the Constitution intended to reserve for the federal government to regulate.”
They did indeed. It’s explicitly delegated to congress which declined to pass a law like this.
The EO is just obviously null and void in the face of any relevant state law.
In a parallel universe, the government in the 20th century signed bills protecting tobacco giants from State regulation to encourage investments furthering the country’s international competitiveness in the tobacco industry.
In a parallel universe tobacco is critical to the national security interest of the state. I feel you and other commenters in this thread are ignoring the fact that the outcome of the next war will likely be decided on the cyber front.
An EO is not law - the hard part is going to be to get congress onboard. Trump is losing political steam and AI is widely unpopular. Most of this country feels AI is going take their job, poison their children, and increase energy prices.
Right. Congress has the power to preempt state law in an area related to interstate commerce by legislating comprehensive rules. The executive branch does not have the authority to do that by itself.
This is like Trump's "pardon" of someone serving time for a state crime. It does little if anything.
Quite a number of AI-related bills have been introduced in Congress, but very few have made much progress. Search "AI" on congress.gov.
Where this is really going: AI is the boogie man they are going to try to use to infiltrate and take over computing, it's 90s cryptowars 3.0
The pivot will be when they starting talking about AGI and it's dangers and how it must be regulated! (/clutches pearls)... right now they are at the "look at AI we need it it's awesome" stage.
As expected, the stupidest imaginable policy. Take all the guardrails completely off, even though the ones that are in place are already toothless. Don't worry, the free market will ensure that everything is turned into paperclips at the maximum possible speed.
Pure nepotism. Trump also recently softened on cannabis. Who is involved in cannabis (and Adderall) startups? David Sacks, "Crypto and AI czar" and YouTube pundit.
We were promised a better economy, better job chances, and better housing by Mr. Sacks on YouTube.
Instead we get "crypto", "AI" and addictive substance grifting.
Perhaps folks should take some time to realize they've been conned by people whose only interest is their own personal weatlh and power, and will promise anything like "prices are going down day one" or "your income and networth will DOUBLE if you elect me" to get elected.
It could have some teeth considering that the whole point is the executive office is going to establish a task force that investigates state laws in opposition of this federal deregulation of AI. Any states deemed to be out of sync will have certain kinds of federal funding cut from them.
There are a lot of states, and especially state universities, that will not like that.
Is it me or does this seem like naked corruption at its worst? These tech CEOs hang out at the White House and donate to superfluous causes and suddenly the executive is protecting their interests. This does nothing to protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes.
> This does nothing to protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes.
Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?
Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption, which has in turn created millions of jobs that didn't exist before and led to the US running the world's largest economy.
What ISNT an American value is Executive Orders trying to trump State powers without actual legislation.
We regulate medicine, nuclear technology, television, movies, monopolies, energy, financial services, etc. because these things can be harmful if left solely to the market. Americans value honest work, dignity, prosperity and equal opportunity. Innovation is useful in so far as it enables our values - regulation is not counter to Americans interests, it protects them.
I feel like anyone making this argument hasn't studied how those regulations happened.
They ALL happened AFTER people got hurt. That's how we do things here. We always have.
It's kind of messed up, but the alternative is a bunch of rules on things that wouldn't be a real problem.
Who got hurt before the US banned the export of cryptography?
The latter is called the EU.
Why?
Because that's what the people who made all of those rules decided to call themselves.
> We regulate medicine, nuclear technology, television, movies, monopolies, energy, financial services, etc.
Many of those regulations at the federal level, yes?
>Many of those regulations at the federal level, yes?
In addition to ones at state level, yes.
Sure. And this is not that. This says: before we begin to think about our policy let's make sure to remove any barriers for Mr. Altman and friends so that they don't get sucked down with their Oracle branded boat anchor.
If this had any whiff of actually shedding light on these needed regulations the root OP wouldn't have said what they did. But for now I'm going to head over to Polymarket and see if there are any bets I can place on Trump's kids being appointed to the OpenAI board.
Not true that US is 100% gas pedal constantly on innovation. You’re forgetting labor reform movements and the service switch away from industry in the last few decades. Also the de-science-ing of the current admin has vastly reduced our innovative capacity, as well as the virtual decapitation of brain drain. Those next generation of brightest immigrants certainly aren’t coming here to deal with ICE, and that’s been the source of half the great minds in our country throughout its history, gone because of racism.
I kind of doubt American scientists will leave en masse to go elsewhere. Their options are only Europe, the UK, or China. Most will not be willing to give up the salaries or the resources available to scientists in the USA, even with the current administration, to go live in strongly hierarchical academic systems that they don’t know how to navigate. Especially not for a 30% salary reduction (or more if they go someplace like France or Italy).
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption
Arguably true, but it's also been way ahead of the pack (people tend to forget this) on protection for organized labor, social safety net entitlements, and regulation of harmful industrial safety and environmental externalities.
This statement is awfully one-sided.
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption
Until that "innovation and disruption" threatens any established player, at which point they run crying to the government to grease some palms. China is innovating and disrupting the entire energy sector via renewables and battery storage while the US is cowering in the corner trying to flaccidly resuscitate the corpse of the coal industry.
The case against this EO is not “banning new technology”. It’s not allowing the federal government to ban any state regulation. And states having the power to make their own rules is maybe the most American value.
It's not even that, as this isn't Federal Law.
> Going back to the Industrial Revolution the United States has been 100% gas pedal all the time on innovation and disruption, which has in turn created millions of jobs that didn't exist before and led to the US running the world's largest economy.
Where did you get the idea that this was the cause that created millions of jobs and lead to the US running the world's largest economy, and not say - the knock-on effects of the US joining WW2 relatively late and unscathed, making it the only major world power left with a functioning enough industrial complex to export to war-ravaged Europe?
I see your point, but that is definitely not the only cause of American economic dominance. The U.S. has been the largest economy by GDP since ca 1900 – i.e. before the wars.
There is more to history than ww2.
The patent system. I know someone will respond detailing why the patent system is pro-business, but it is objectively government regulation that puts restrictions on new technology, so it's proof that regulation of that sort is at least an American tradition if not fully an "American value".
Patents and trademarks are the only ways to create legal monopolies. They are/were intended to reward innovation but despite good intentions are abused.
Intellectual property restrictions cause harm even when used as intended. They are an extreme rest restriction on market activity and I believe they cause more harm than good.
Not exactly. For example, Major League Baseball has been granted an anti-trust exemption by the US Supreme Court, because they said it was not a business. In some cases in which firms have been found guilty of violating the anti-trust laws, they were fined amounts minuscule in relation to the profits they gained by operating the monopoly. Various governments in the US outsource public services to private monopolies, and the results have sometimes amounted to a serious restraint of trade. The chicanery goes back a long way. For the first decade or so after the passage of the Sherman Act, it was not used against the corporate monopolies that it was written to limit; it was invoked only against labor unions trying to find a way to get a better deal out of the firms operating company stores and company towns etc, etc. Then Teddy Roosevelt, the so-called trust-buster, invoked it under the assumption that he could tell the difference between good and bad monopolies and that he had the power to leave the good monopolies alone. 120 years later, we are in the same sorry situation.
Patents, trademarks, copyright, deeds and other similar concepts are part of what makes capitalism what it is, without them capitalism will not work because they are the mechanisms that enforce private property.
Maybe it should be. The system here in the US has produced some great innovations at the cost of great misery among the non-wealthy. At a time when technology promises an easier life, it only seems to benefit the wealthy, while trying to discard everyone else. The light at the end of the tunnel is a 1%-er about to laughingly crush you beneath their wheels.
I don't think this is the strongest argument. Every technological revolution so far has initially benefited the wealthy and taken a generation or two for its effects to lift the masses out of previous levels of poverty, but ultimately each one has.
To me the stronger argument about AI is that this revolution won't. And that's because this one is not really about productivity or even about capital investment in things that people nominally would want (faster transport, cheaper cotton, home computers). This one is about ending revolution once and for all; it's not about increeasing the wealth of the wealthy, it's about being the first to arrive at AGI and thus cementing that wealth disparity for all perpetuity. It's the endgame.
I don't know if that's true, but that's to me the argument as to why this one is exceptional and why the capitalist argument for American prosperity is inapplicable in this case.
I don't know about for all perpetuity. If history has shown, anyone that reaches the pinnacle eventually becomes complacent, technology improves by becoming faster/cheaper/smaller. That just means it is prime to always be susceptible to a new something coming along that stands on the shoulders of what came before without having to pay for it. They start where the current leader fought to achieve.
The idea behind self improving AGI is that it will "get" every "new something coming along" before everyone else.
We have had the capacity to have zero poverty for many decades, maybe over a century. China eliminated extreme poverty.
I don’t know about that. The poor from just about every other country in the world seem desperate to live in America. While American capitalism has many faults, oppressing the bottom quintile is not one of them. The US median income is consistently top ten globally.
Median income doesn't tell much if you don't factor in the cost of living. My salary sucks compared to what I would earn in America, but when I factor in things like free healthcare, daycare and higher level education, I'm better off here.
What countries offer free daycare? I know there are a few in Europe. It's not super common, so I'm curious to know where
I believe Sweden is one: https://www.sdg16.plus/policies/universal-childcare-model-sw...
This is completely wrong. Even “the poor” in most parts of the world has a pretty good life weight where they are.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w&pp=ygUMSGFucyByb3N...
>The poor from just about every other country in the world seem desperate to live in America
Immigration to the USA, both illegal and legal, has cratered.
> Where did you get the idea that banning new technology that could eliminate jobs is even remotely an American value?
Copyright law is another counter-example to your argument. But somehow? that’s no longer a concern if you have enough money. I guess the trick is to steal from literally everyone so that no one entity can claim any measurable portion of the output as damages.
I’ve always thought Copyright should be way shorter than it is, but it’s suspect that we’re having a coming to Jesus moment about IP with all the AI grifting going on.
Copyright has nothing to do with banning technology. It is a set of rules around a particular kind of property rights.
There are things you can do with technology that are banned as a result of copyright protections, but the underlying technologies are not banned, only the particular use of them is.
I’m saying if the law was respected at all this technology would be banned. I don’t know that I prefer that outcome, but it is the truth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
The question isn’t the jobs created but how have workers benefited from increased productivity? They haven’t materially since late 1970s. That’s when the American labor movement began its decline. Innovation isn’t what helps workers. The gains from innovation have to be wrenched from the hands of the ruling class through organized resistance.
I think your take is historically accurate. Although one does wonder how long we'll be able to get away with keeping the pedal to the metal. It might be worth taking a moment to install a steering wheel. Rumor has it there are hazards about.
I'm in agreement because what is there to say about AI policy?
This govt clearly isn't going to regulate against harms like perpetuating systems of racism. This government adores to perpetuate systems of racism.
So fuck it. Let's race to the bottom like the companies want to so badly.
That's lobbying simplified, no need to pay lobbyist.
This is a tribute system, way past lobbying. Lobbying is cheap, Senators can be bought off for 5-figure sums. CEOs pay lobbyists so they don't have to meet with them personally. What's happening now involves CEOs appearing at political events and lobbying the president personally, to the tune of millions of dollars in declared "donations" for "ballroom construction", in exchange for security guarantees for their business empires.
Lobbying is tightly regulated, and the FEC really does keep a close eye.
This is just flat out bribery, using the thinnest of legal fig leaves. Which would not possibly pass muster if he hadn't also packed the court with supporters.
> does keep a close eye
"kept", I think.
You don’t seem to appreciate: they paid for the ballroom. They have a right to set policy. That’s how an oligarchy works
That’s how campaign contributions have worked for a long time. Now it’s just a touch more blatant.
The rest of the world has always called it corruption.
Is it you? I mean, the guy started his term by launching a scam coin along with his wife. He hates the United States and sees it as just something to exploit for financial gain and power. That's it. That's literally all there is to all of his actions.
Par for the course with this administration.
It is definitely naked corruption. Lobbying was always around, but I would say that with this administration things are a lot more transactional and a lot more in the open. Companies like Palantir and Anduril and others are being gifted contracts all over the place - that’s money we taxpayers are losing.
> Companies like . . . Anduril are being gifted contracts all over the place - that’s money we taxpayers are losing.
Can you point to a concrete example of this?
It's hard to say what they're actually qualified to do but they went from receiving 1 or 2 contracts per year in the early 2020s for a few 10s of millions and I think one larger $200M one to this since Trump was reelected;
$200M - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/1527a7adaff14a5280fc7...
$140M - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/c0203e75ec2949e78966f...
$31M - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/8b0b944955064864942fc...
$1M - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/86d997fbd8a74d0cb298c...
$642M over 10 years - https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/c9878b113f5143cba7edb...
$3.1M - https://sam.gov/opp/f15d4b63ebc846cd9f4870cfa0772fff/view
$160M - https://www.anduril.com/news/anduril-awarded-contract-to-red...
$86M - https://www.anduril.com/news/special-operations-command-sele...
$100M - https://www.anduril.com/news/anduril-awarded-usd99-6m-for-u-...
tbh there's nothing weird about those.
The Marine Corps I-CsUAS award is explicitly described as an IDIQ with a maximum dollar value of $642M over 10 years -- though it could be much less -- and reporting indicates it was competitively procured with 10 offerors. It wasn't "gifted"/"no-bid"
Also: $642M spread over 10 years is roughly $64M/year at the ceiling, and ceilings are often not fully used. That scale is not remotely unusual for a program-of-record counter-UAS capability if the government believes the threat is persistent. (Which it does.)
The rest are similarly mundane and justifiable.
Here's what would be weird: Repeated sole-source awards where a competitive approach is feasible, implausible technical scope relative to deliverables, unjustified pricing, or political intervention affecting downselects. I don't see any of that here. (But, okay, let's not talk about Palantir, lol.)
It is well known in Defense circles that much of what Anduril does comes in on no-bid black budget contracts. Often short duration or low volume.
Imagine Silicon Valley CEOs pumped full of VC dollars and embedded with units that Don't Exist in places We Were Never At.
Just another step towards Russian style naked oligarchy.
> protect working US citizens from AI alien (agents) coming to take their jobs and displace their incomes
So where is this coalition that’s organized to actually make this real?
Software engineers are allergic to unionization (despite the recent id win) and 100% of capital owners (this is NOT business owner and operators I’m talking about LPs and Fund Managers) are in support of labor automation as a priority, the same people also run every government and overwhelmingly select the politicians available to vote for, so who will fund and lead your advocacy?
Game developers are subject to much more abuse than the average software engineering job, for less pay. It's a different environment.
I'm open to the idea of guilds, but personally I do not want others negotiating for me with the type of work I do, I'd prefer it to be a contract between me, my employer and nothing else. Unions aren't always a net benefit for every industry.
Of course, with AI going the way it is, collective bargaining might become more attractive in our field. But institutions can be slow to catch up and not everyone always agrees with the outcome. Personally, if I worked in Hollywood, I'd be upset about the kind of anti-AI scaremongering and regulation taking place in the WGA and SAG-AFTRA.
For this brief moment in time, crime is legal.
The US was founded on crime. We are a colonial imperial country with a penchant for using racism and religion in order to maintain a certain lifestyle for white supremacists.
Slavery was really not that long ago, we are still actively invading countries and murdering people for oil, and we help bankroll straight up genocide in regions such as Darfur and Palestine.
This is business as usual.
We still do slavery and it's even kept in the 13th amendment as a punishment.
Whats wrong if US population has voted for this? There was no surprises this time - everyone can expect what is going to happen.
Didn’t the majority of people vote to “drain the swamp” and “bring down the cost of living”?
People had nearly a decade of experience with Donald Trump as a known political entity and decades of receipts and lawsuits prior to 2016 to speak to his amoral and corrupt nature. If they didn't know exactly what they were buying into they were idiots. He isn't exactly a master manipulator.
Also, The first time Trump was elected, the majority of voters went for Hillary Clinton. Second time, it was still 49% versus 48% for Kamala Harris. The majority of Americans have never voted for Donald Trump nor ever supported him.
You aren't missing anything. This is oligarchic capture of the government.
This is the most pro-tech admin in decades, and that terrifies me.
did you not see who was standing next to him. All of the top tech bros of silicon valley in their search for the fountain of youth.
Question number one. Is dominance really a necessary part of a country's existence? Can't you just have peaceful relations and supportive relationships with other countries to live in harmony, when artificial intelligence brings benefits to all countries, not just the USA? Can't you build on the technological foundations that have been laid to create sustainable development for your society?
The desire for more. To have more than others, is a key problem that generates unhealthy politics. Unhealthy foreign policy towards other countries. In your pursuit of being first in everything. Being first in everything, preventing the development of other countries, holding onto technologies for yourself. You create an imbalance. You create an imbalance in the global economy, in politics, in the social sphere, and in the social environment.
Isn't there an alternative to having sustainable development? Built on the principles of mutual support and focused not on dominance, but on collaboration between peaceful states. Between peaceful states.
> Can't you just have peaceful relations and supportive relationships with other countries to live in harmony
"I can picture a world without fear, without hate. I can picture us conquering that world, because they'd never expect it."
Yes, dominance is preferred. Countries’ resources aren’t evenly distributed, and this fact determines foreign policy more than anything else.
There’s no world govt or global authority. Every country must look after its own interests.
Having every country cooperate requires trusting some entity as a global enforcer, one that wont abuse their unchecked power. Obviously, america has played this role since ww2 but not without plenty of mistakes and oversights.
We as humans haven’t found an alternative to this yet.
Any company dumb enough to try to use this to ignore actual state law will get what they deserve. No state court will give them a pass when they claim an EO has any force of law or that it was reasonable to rely on it.
Even given the current state of things (I’m a lawyer, so well aware) I would put money on this
Like most of what Trump does it's 1000% emo and also very stupid. It's proudly anti-democratic and fundamentally disrespectful of American values.
People fall for it because fear of foreign rivals, frustration with a regulatory patchwork, and anti‑“ideological” backlash make a centralized, tough‑sounding fix emotionally satisfying. Big Tech and national‑security rhetoric also create an illusion that “dominance” equals safety and prosperity, short‑circuiting careful federalism and due process.
Federal Preemption: A Legal Primer — https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45825
CRS is really underappreciated. Seeing you link that report here made me happy.
What does this have to do with executive orders?
I imagine it’s a nod to the way the stated goal would normally be pursued, but in this case is not.
It sounds like a good idea to establish a uniform national policy! And the federal government can do that (although only for the very specific purposes spelled out in the Constitution). The right way to do that is to pass a law through both houses of Congress, and the president to sign it into law. Maybe the law even specifies a broad framework and authorizes the executive branch to dial in the specific details (although the court seems to be souring on that kind of thing too).
The god-king proclaiming a brand new framework governing a major new sector of the economy To Be So is.. not the normal way
The link is highly relevant to the executive order because this executive order attempts to place limitations on what laws US states can create.
EOs aren't law though. They're guidance for the rest of the executive branch on how to execute the laws written by congress.
The Legislative branch (Congress) not the Executive branch (White House) can preempt states.
That's the whole point. They aren't law, and they were (probably) never meant to be so far-reaching, and yet the clear purpose of this Executive Order is to tell the states what laws they can enact. The EO doesn't have the legal power to do that directly, but it clearly outlines the intention to withdraw federal funding from states that refuse to toe the line.
I don't know if you've heard, but norms don't matter anymore.
Can you guys just read stuff before talking?
> The order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to create an “AI Litigation Task Force” within 30 days whose "sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws" that clash with the Trump administration's vision for light-touch regulation.
The EO isn't about Federal Preemption. Trump's not creating a law to preempt states. So a question about how Federal Preemption is relevant is on point.
> My Administration must act with the Congress to ensure that there is a minimally burdensome national standard — not 50 discordant State ones. …
Sounds like leaving it up to Congress! But then the administration vows to thwart state laws despite the vacuum of no extant preemption, so effectively imposing a type of supposed Executive preemption:
> Until such a national standard exists, however, it is imperative that my Administration takes action to check the most onerous and excessive laws emerging from the States that threaten to stymie innovation.
So preemption link is relevant, I think; and at any rate, helpful to give background to those not familiar with the concept, which constitutes the field against which this is happening.
Also why are they small federal government states rights for things but big federal government centralized power for this? It doesn't make sense to me.
When you start thinking of the political elite as out of touch sociopathic aristocrats, it becomes easier to understand their behavior.
Their goal is to make money and enrich their own lives at the expense of everyone else.
Stephen Miller is just super weird though. Don’t bother trying to figure that guy out.
It's right in the text of the EO: they intend to argue that the state laws are preempted by existing federal regulations, and they also direct the creation of new regulations to create preemption if necessary, specifically calling on the FCC and FTC to make new federal rules to preempt disfavored state laws. Separately it talks about going to Congress for new laws but mostly this lays out an attempt to do it with executive action as much as possible, both through preemption and by using funding to try to coerce the states.
There's a reasonable argument that nationwide regulation is the more efficient and proper path here but I think it's pretty obvious that the intent is to make toothless "regulation" simply to trigger preemption. You don't have to do much wondering to figure out the level of regulation that David Sacks is looking for.
I think the message between the lines is what's important, and it goes like this:
"We in the executive branch have an agreement with the Supreme Court allowing us to bypass congress and enact edicts. We will do this by sending the Justice Department any state law that gets in the way of our donors, sending the layup to our Republican Supreme Court, who will dunk on the States for us and nullify their law."
We don't have to go through the motions of pretending we still live in a constitutional republic, it's okay to talk frankly about reality as it exists.
It goes deeper than that - the Supreme Council will issue non-binding "guidance" on the "shadow docket", so that when/if the fascists/destructionists [0] lose the Presidency, they can go back to being obstructionists weaponizing high-minded ideals in bad faith. As a libertarian, the way I see it is we can disagree politically on what constitutes constructive solutions, but it's time to unite, stop accepting any of the fascists' nonsense, and take back the fucking government - full support for the one remaining mainstream party that at least nominally represents the interests of the United States, while demanding they themselves stop preemptively appeasing the fascists. The Libertarian, Green, or even new parties can step up as the opposition. Pack the courts with judges that believe in America first and foremost, make DC and PR states to mitigate the fascists' abuse of the Senate, and so on. After we've stopped the hemorrhaging, work on fundamental things like adopting ranked pairs voting instead of this plurality trash.
[0] I'd be willing to call them something else if they picked an honest name for themselves - they are most certainly not "conservatives"
This is quite literally going to lead to a Supreme Court case about Federal Preemption. Bondi will challenge some CA law, they will lose and appeal until they get to the Supreme Court. I don't have any grace to give people at this point, you have to be willingly turning a blind eye if you do not see where this will end up.
Federal preemption requires federal law (aka laws written by congress). How else would it get to the supreme court?
The EO mentions congress passing new law a few times in addition to an executive task force to look into challenging state laws based on constitutional violations or federal statues. That's the only way they'd get in front of a judge.
If the plan is for the executive to invent new laws it's not mapped out in this EO
> Federal preemption requires federal law (aka laws written by congress). How else would it get to the supreme court?
1. No federal preemption currently. (No federal law, therefore no regulation on the matter that should preempt.)
2. State passes and enforces law regarding AI.
3. Trump directs Bondi to challenge the state law on nonsense grounds.
4. In the lawsuit, the state points out that there is no federal preemption; oh yeah, 10th Amendment; and that the administration's argument is nonsense.
5. The judge, say Eileen Cannon, invalidates the state law.
6. Circuit Court reverses.
7. Administration seeks and immediately gets a grant of certiorari — and the preemption matter is in the Supreme Court.
> passing new law … only way they'd get it in front of a judge.
The EO directs Bondi to investigate whether, and argue that, existing executive regulations (presumably on other topics) preempt state legislation.
Regardless, the EO makes it a priority to find and take advantage of some way to challenge and possibly invalidate state laws on the subject. This is a new take on preemption: creation of a state-law vacuum on the subject, through scorched-earth litigation (how Trumpian!), despite an utter absence of federal legislation on the matter.
the Task Force can try to challenge state AI laws. they can file whatever lawsuits they want. they will probably lose most of their suits, because there's very little ground for challenging state AI regulations.
Those suits will be seen by the worst judges the Heritage Foundation could ram through. I would not be nearly so confident of a sane outcome.
peterlk and lesuorac nail it: the EO purports to preempt state law, but EOs aren't law and that's not how preemption works.
Probably something to do with the section titled:
> Sec. 7. *Preemption of State Laws* Mandating Deceptive Conduct in AI Models.
Executive order (EO) count over the last few presidents:
* Bush (41): 166
* Clinton (two terms): 364
* Bush (43; two terms): 291
* Obama (two terms): 276
* Trump (45): 220
* Biden: 162
* Trump (47; <1 year): 218
Source:
* https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-or...
Someone commented that (one of?) the reason that Trump is using EOs so much is probably because is not willing (or able) to actually get deals on in the legislature to pass his policies (or what passes for policy with him).
EOs also aren't laws, they're instructions on how to execute policy. This administration treats them as the former.
Everything they do, however, is petty, cruel and nakedly corrupt while also being marred by a total lack of competence.
I think the Administration is likely to get its toys taken away soon.
the Major Questions Doctrine, the end of Chevron deference, the mandate for Article III courts from Jarkesy, have been building towards this for a while. the capstone in this program of weakening the administrative state, overturning Humphrey's Executor when Trump v. Slaughter is decided, will likely revive the Intelligible Principle Doctrine, as Justice Gorsuch has hinted. the same trend is apparent in the IEEPA tariffs case, where non-delegation got a lot of airtime.
EOs lose a lot of their punch when the Executive's delegated rulemaking and adjudication powers are returned back to their rightful owners in the other two branches.
I don't know where you get the confidence that any of that matters to SCOTUS. They know their role, and they are playing.
SCOTUS has ruled against Trump numerous times.
But they rule in his favor more often than not. They gave him freaking immunity for any crimes he may commit. This alone enables him to disregard the law without any fear of repercussions.
> This alone enables him to disregard the law without any fear of repercussions.
That does not apply to his lackeys though (unless there's a preemptive pardon).
If (!) there's a change in the President eventually, there needs to be a reckoning for everyone that didn't push back on instructions/orders (including all the folks down the line who are blowing up (alleged) drug boats).
That the president can pardon any criminal providing no justification is preposterous nonsense. Much reform is needed.
Everyone will have preemptive pardons. That has already been guaranteed to them or we wouldn't see so much open lawlessness.
I fear by reducing control over executive power to one, squishy standard like the Intelligible Principle Doctrine will let SCOTUS pick and choose which laws have intelligible principles. When conservatives are in power, suddenly all laws will have them. And swing back when liberals are in control.
> I think the Administration is likely to get its toys taken away soon.
Perhaps worth reading "The umpire who picked a side: John Roberts and the death of rule of law in America":
* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/aug/...
Also "John Roberts and the Cynical Cult of Federalist No. 70":
* https://newrepublic.com/article/204334/john-roberts-federali...
And "This Is All John Roberts’ Fault":
* https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/11/john-roberts-do...
And perhaps "Trump Allies Sue John Roberts To Give White House Control Of Court System":
* https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-allies-sue-john-rob...
Or why bother when no one will stop you from ruling by fiat?
Yes, why would you bother not exercising power you possess?
Yep. I punch literally everyone I meet in the face.
I have the power to do it. Why would I not?
Is assaulting people going further your goals?
Presumably EOs further the President’s goals.
If it does further my goals then it's fine to punch people in the face?
Many of those goals are to simply hurt the "wrong" type of people.
“And then the leopards ate my face”
Do you mean “restraint”?
Yes, and..
Each EO tests the waters a bit more with what the public and other branches will tolerate. As we’ve seen with numerous orders already, Congress and business will comply early because they think it will benefit them.
Trump thinks himself a king. He acts like it. He’s attempting to normalize his behavior. He can’t deal with the legislature because it turns out white supremacy isn’t that popular. Who knew?
Apparently popular enough to get him elected. It's not like his supporters were under any pretense who or what they were voting for
I think the GOP, the right, etc. do propaganda very well. And they’re good at spinning scandals into things their voter base wants to hear. Or just burying them in a way that makes it hard for their base to find.
Even the centrist TV networks are still treating Trump like a normal president. News like the NYTimes does the same, while platforming horrible people in their op ed section.
Edit: anec-data - I have an embarrassing number of family members that voted for him. I asked why and the surprising common thing among all of them was they just didn’t know. The felonies, convictions, scandals, the racism and transphobia. They were just surprised. And they’re not very good at thinking critically about much of it.
Instead they’re voting for some nostalgia and the idea that they felt safer and more secure in their country when they were younger.
Ross Douthat makes me (figuratively) vomit every time I read his nonsensical garbage.
I once heard it said that Trump governs like a dictator because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is extremely unpopular and his party holds one of the smallest house majorities ever.
*Extremely unpopular in DC, fwiw
Also a 31% approval rating, unpopular with a large majority of people in the US, fwiw
31% on the economy specifically. Unbelievably (to me), a full 41% of the country still believes he’s doing a good job in general.
GOP is a party captured by the very wealthy. It’s minority rule because of certain elites’ trillion dollar plans to control all three branches of government and the courts have come to fruition after decades in the works.
After Nixon a lot of lessons were learned, on how to handle scandals and how to ram unpopular policy down America’s throat.
There is a very vocal opposition to Trump. However, by almost any way you can present "popularity" of a president - be it approval ratings, polling figures, popular vote, electoral vote, etc. - he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.
It's easy to get caught in an echo chamber of like-minded individuals and assume everyone disagrees with his policies - but that is far from reality.
> he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.
Published today: "Trump's approval rating on the economy hits record low 31%"[1]
> President Trump's approval rating on his longtime political calling card — the economy — has sunk to 31%, the lowest it has been across both of his terms as president, according to a new survey from The Associated Press-NORC.
"Trump's Approval Rating Drops to 36%, New Second-Term Low" [2]
> his all-time low was 34% in 2021, at the end of his first term after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The man is only two points above where he was when every reputable institution on the planet was running away from him as fast as possible, and he was nearly convicted in the senate. Less than a year into the term.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/12/12/trump-economy-inflation-aff...
[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/699221/trump-approval-rating-dr...
So it’s only downhill from here?
Yeah it'd be a wild view to call him among the most popular. But he is actually [0] pretty standard for a modern president - probably the least popular [1] but he doesn't stand out that much among the Bush/Biden/Obama polling except that it appears people understood what he was going to do before he entered office instead of discovering it on the way through.
And there is an interesting argument that most modern presidential approvals have more to do with the media environment and better visibility on just how bad their policies are.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_app...
[1] I'd argue better than that loser Bush who was probably the worst president in modern US history and who's polling showed it, but for the sake of keeping things simple.
> And there is an interesting argument that most modern presidential approvals have more to do with the media environment and better visibility on just how bad their policies are.
I think you can go further, the ratings are also heavily tied to things like gasoline prices and the overall economy, and generally things the president has little control over. So actually not much to do with their policies at all. I think Trump knows this and it's why he's done some strategically stupid things to the US fossil fuel industry in order to tactically bring down gasoline prices to juice his ratings.
This likely also explains the 2024 election, because it happened in the context of vast sums of money being sucked out of the economy as the fed tried to fight inflation. Incumbents globally got an absolute thrashing that year regardless of what their actual policies were.
> However, by almost any way you can present "popularity" of a president - be it approval ratings, polling figures, popular vote, electoral vote, etc. - he is one of the more popular presidents in US history.
You might want to look up those data yourself because uh he's actually unpopular in those metrics.
Approval - 42.5% [1]. Much better than Trump's love interest Biden's 37.1% [2] but being below 50% is unpopular.
Popular Vote / Electoral Vote - 49.8%, 312. I may need to tell you this so I will. 50% is greater than 49.8%; a majority of voters (nevermind the country) did not want Trump. As before, this is better than Biden's 306 and Trump1's 304 but worse than Obama2 (332), Obama1 (365) and in general 312 (57%) is nothing to write home about.
[1]: https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil...
[2]: https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-biden-failed
> It's easy to get caught in an echo chamber
No shit?
Dude, I'm a swing voter and even I can see his popularity ratings are historically low.
And here I thought the GOP was the "states rights" "small gov" party.
It's never been about principles of states rights. It's always about disliking specific national policies and spinning the argument to make it sound as if it's about a reasonable principle.
"State's rights to do what?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZB2ftCl2Vk
Yeah, was thinking the same thing. Reading this:
> State-by-State regulation by definition creates a patchwork of 50 different regulatory regimes
Like... isn't that the whole point? Let the states decide?
The regulation vs innovation framing is a false dichotomy here. Most developed economies have found that thoughtful regulation enables _sustainable_ innovation - see GDPR and data privacy innovation, or pharma regulations driving R&D.
For AI specifically, baseline standards around model documentation, data sourcing transparency, and compute auditing would actually help larger players (who can afford compliance) and reduce race-to-bottom dynamics that harm smaller developers.
A win for states rights!
Just like the last time Trump was president he is far from a traditional conservative regarding small government. People pretend the 2010 tea party is the same thing as Trump as some sort of gotcha, but he's never been that way. He's always been very assertive regarding expanding executive and federal power.
No one is surprised about that guy, those comments usually point out how "the 2010 tea party", and everyone else from the decades, if not centuries, of the conservative milieu, are suddenly all in on this.
The president isnt going to personally enrich himself and his cronies by _divesting_ power from his offce
I agree, the main reason is he has been very effective with his cult of personality to get most of the republican congressmen in line. They lose elections if they don't and politicians aren't known for sticking to their values once in power.
The actual small government republican congressmen like https://x.com/justinamash have been very critical of Trump's power grabs but he lost political favor doing so
> shall, in consultation with the Special Advisor for AI and Crypto
It's funny to me that they categorise AI and crypto together like this, two technologies that have nothing to do with each other (other than both being favoured by grifters).
Federal Preemption: A Legal Primer — https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45825
meanwhile the url is a different, more direct kind of statement:
eliminating-state-law-obstruction-of-national-artificial-intelligence-policy
National … is it relevant ? And what is the point and why republicans do what the democrats do. Wonder.
This is hardly readable. What’s this about?
More than anything, they need to match and then exceed Singapore's text and data mining exception for copyrighted works. I'll be happy to tell them how since I wrote several versions of it trying to balance all sides.
The minimum, though, is that all copyrighted works the supplier has legal access to can be copied, transformed arbitrarily, and used for training. And they can share those and transformed versions with anyone else who already has legal access to that data. And no contract, including terms of use, can override that. And they can freely scrape it but maybe daily limits imposed to avoid destructive scraping.
That might be enough to collect, preprocess, and share datasets like The Pile, RefinedWeb, uploaded content the host shares (eg The Stack, Youtube). We can do a lot with big models trained that way. We can also synthesize other data from them with less risk.
> Earlier this week, he reiterated that sentiment in a post on Truth Social, saying: “We are beating ALL COUNTRIES at this point in the race, but that won’t last long if we are going to have 50 States, many of them bad actors
Has Trump IDed the alleged bad actor states?
It’s the blue ones, of course.
It’s hard to tell if what he says is even relate to what he will do. A hardline on semiconductors to China faded this week when he needed some economic stimulation.
So when states without AI data centers seek to ameliorate tax and zoning obstacles, it won’t be Federal preemption in their way, but what benefits Trump.
True current title: Trump signs executive order aimed at preventing states from regulating AI
In particular, the bulk of the substantial text of the order has a pretty clear culture war bend with all the talk about how truthful AI is. This is in large part a fight over the political leaning of AI models.
> Republicans earlier this year failed to pass a similar 10-year moratorium on state laws that regulate AI as part of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with the Senate voting 99-1 to remove that ban from the legislation. Trump’s order resurrects that effort, which failed after bipartisan pushback and Republican infighting, but as an order that lacks the force of law. [0]
> Trump has framed the need for comprehensive AI regulation as both a necessity for the technology’s development and as a means of preventing leftist ideology from infiltrating generative AI – a common conservative grievance among tech leaders such as Elon Musk.
On the other hand ..... Grok and others ...
From the party of "states rights" and "small government"
[0] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/d...
White House AI czar and Silicon Valley venture capitalist David Sacks elaborated on the rationale for the executive order in a post on X.
Sacks argued that this domain of “interstate commerce” was “the type of economic activity that the Framers of the Constitution intended to reserve for the federal government to regulate.”
At the Oval Office signing ceremony, Sacks said, "We have 50 states running in 50 different directions. It just doesn't make sense."
So much for "states rights" and the "laboratories of democracy."
We had a pretty decisive event eliminating precicely that experiment
Could you be more specific?
He probably means the civil war.
I'd like to point out that the South was only a fan of States Rights exactly insofar as they let them do slavery. The millisecond it came to forcing Northern states to return escaped slaves, they suddenly weren't the same principled supporters of devolving and federating power. Funny how that works.
And just in case it wasn't clear enough already: one of the first acts of the Confederacy was to draft a provisional constitution which explicitly authorized slavery, and which prohibited either Congress or any state from passing laws to the contrary.
States also weren't allow to leave the Confederacy ...
Yeah, I just wanted them to cut out the coy vagueposting and say out loud how bad they think Reconstruction was.
So in that respect, mission accomplished.
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/14th-amendment
Wickard v Filburn rearing its ugly ahead again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
Many of the ills currently befalling the US can be traced to the New Deal era. Including, of course, an HN favorite: our system of employer-sponsored health insurance.
I’m not a legal scholar but this seems pretty bone headed.
Which part?
The "The U.S. government had established limits on wheat production, based on the acreage owned by a farmer, to stabilize wheat prices and supplies." seems like quite the federal overreach never mind the court decision.
Mostly the decision but yeah it’s a double whammy of bad policy from congress and probably worse ruling from the court.
> Sacks argued that this domain of “interstate commerce” was “the type of economic activity that the Framers of the Constitution intended to reserve for the federal government to regulate.”
They did indeed. It’s explicitly delegated to congress which declined to pass a law like this.
The EO is just obviously null and void in the face of any relevant state law.
In a parallel universe, the government in the 20th century signed bills protecting tobacco giants from State regulation to encourage investments furthering the country’s international competitiveness in the tobacco industry.
In a parallel universe tobacco is critical to the national security interest of the state. I feel you and other commenters in this thread are ignoring the fact that the outcome of the next war will likely be decided on the cyber front.
I don’t think humanity will survive the next war.
I’m hopeful humanity will, but civilization isn’t making it
That does kind of draw a contrast between Jesse Helms, the ultimate tobacco Senator, and Trump. They’re almost opposites.
An EO is not law - the hard part is going to be to get congress onboard. Trump is losing political steam and AI is widely unpopular. Most of this country feels AI is going take their job, poison their children, and increase energy prices.
Right. Congress has the power to preempt state law in an area related to interstate commerce by legislating comprehensive rules. The executive branch does not have the authority to do that by itself.
This is like Trump's "pardon" of someone serving time for a state crime. It does little if anything.
Quite a number of AI-related bills have been introduced in Congress, but very few have made much progress. Search "AI" on congress.gov.
Where do you get this impression? I don’t know anybody who thinks that.
> Trump is losing political steam and AI is widely unpopular.
It seems extremely popular based on my LinkedIn feed! /s
Good thing LinkedIn is such an authentic representation of the vox populi
Where this is really going: AI is the boogie man they are going to try to use to infiltrate and take over computing, it's 90s cryptowars 3.0
The pivot will be when they starting talking about AGI and it's dangers and how it must be regulated! (/clutches pearls)... right now they are at the "look at AI we need it it's awesome" stage.
As expected, the stupidest imaginable policy. Take all the guardrails completely off, even though the ones that are in place are already toothless. Don't worry, the free market will ensure that everything is turned into paperclips at the maximum possible speed.
Pure nepotism. Trump also recently softened on cannabis. Who is involved in cannabis (and Adderall) startups? David Sacks, "Crypto and AI czar" and YouTube pundit.
We were promised a better economy, better job chances, and better housing by Mr. Sacks on YouTube.
Instead we get "crypto", "AI" and addictive substance grifting.
Perhaps folks should take some time to realize they've been conned by people whose only interest is their own personal weatlh and power, and will promise anything like "prices are going down day one" or "your income and networth will DOUBLE if you elect me" to get elected.
I wish this article would include what the details of the framework are. It’s unhelpful in its current form.
We've since changed the URL to link to the order itself, and put links to other articles in the toptext.
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46239009
We'll merge that thread hither.
Very welcome order to prevent the anti-AI movement from stymieing the development of AI in the U.S.
Except it does literally nothing since EO can’t preempt state law
It could have some teeth considering that the whole point is the executive office is going to establish a task force that investigates state laws in opposition of this federal deregulation of AI. Any states deemed to be out of sync will have certain kinds of federal funding cut from them.
There are a lot of states, and especially state universities, that will not like that.