White House Circulates Draft Executive Order Targeting State AI Laws

On Tuesday, United States President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social that “Investment in AI is helping to make the U.S. Economy the ‘HOTTEST’ in the World — But overregulation by the States is threatening to undermine this Growth Engine.” On Wednesday, the Trump administration circulated a six-page draft executive order titled “Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National AI Policy.”

Like other artifacts of the administration’s AI policy, the draft order is framed as a necessity to secure American “economic security and dominance across many domains.” And like other Trump administration executive orders, it is as much a political screed as a policy document.

The draft repeats an assertion popular with industry boosters—that “State legislatures have introduced over 1,000 AI bills that threaten to undermine” innovation—and takes issue, specifically, with recent laws passed in California and Colorado. It says such laws are the work of “sophisticated proponents of a fear-based regulatory capture strategy” that are creating “a patchwork regulatory framework that forces compliance with the lowest common denominator and allows the most restrictive states to dictate national Al policy at the expense of America’s domination of this new frontier.”