The US risks losing ground to China if it ends up with a “patchwork of 50 different regulatory regimes,” the White House has said
US President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to curb individual state-level regulation of artificial intelligence, until a nationwide policy is adopted. A fragmented legal landscape threatens America’s AI competitiveness compared to China, the US federal government has said.
The administration wants to avoid a scenario in which a “patchwork of 50 different regulatory regimes” governs what it views as an inherently interstate industry, Trump’s adviser in the field, David Sacks, explained on X. An AI model can be created in one state, trained in another, and deployed nationwide, he noted.
Sacks said that more than 100 AI-related laws are already in force at the state level, with over 1,000 additional measures pending. “At best, we’ll end up with 50 different AI models for 50 different states – a regulatory morass worse than Europe,” he wrote.
Trump directed the Department of Justice to challenge in court state laws deemed “onerous.” Washington will also use federal grants and government contracts to encourage states to align with federal policy. The measures are described as temporary, pending the adoption by Congress of a “minimally burdensome national standard” for AI regulation.
The White House has also cited ideological concerns, accusing Democratic-led states of imposing “woke” constraints on AI developers, such as requirements aimed at preventing “algorithmic discrimination” against protected groups.
“This type of ideological meddling is how we ended up with ‘black George Washington’,” Sacks wrote, referencing a widely publicized situation last year in which Google’s Gemini image generator tended to produce race-swapped depictions of historical figures in an apparent attempt to maximize diversity.
The Trump administration and US tech firms are placing heavy bets on AI as a driver of economic growth, though critics warn that massive investment in the sector is based on uncertain profit projections and may be inflating a market bubble.
There are also concerns about public backlash, as the rapid expansion of energy-intensive data centers needed to run AI systems has driven up electricity prices in some areas. Sacks emphasized that the new policy “would not force communities to host data centers they don’t want.”
