Democrats and Republicans Both Want To Regulate AI. They Just Can't Agree on How. |
Artificial Intelligence
Democrats and Republicans Both Want To Regulate AI. They Just Can't Agree on How.
As lawmakers of both major parties hustle to regulate their preferred villains, they're losing sight of the big picture. The possible gains to humanity from AI are enormous.
Jack Nicastro | From the May 2026 issue
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(Illustration: Joanna Andreasson/ChatGPT-5.3)
At the federal level, Republican-written AI bills tend to be less concerned with policing how individuals use the technology than with regulating the development and deployment of the underlying technology—large language models (LLMs). Democrat-written bills tend to focus on individual malfeasance rather than the tech itself.
Accordingly, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) was so outraged last year by a (hilarious) deepfake of herself that she called on Congress to affirm "the right to demand that social media companies remove deepfakes of their voice and likeness." In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three bills in 2024 that restricted the use of AI to create political content deemed deceptive in advance of elections.
On the other side of the aisle, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) doesn't just want to ban driverless cars to protect unionized truck drivers from automation or ban minors from accessing AI companion chatbots; he wants frontier AI developers to submit their models to the Energy Department for potential nationalization before they're granted permission to deploy their models commercially.
But it's not like there's no overlap. Each of these bills is co-sponsored by at least one senator from the other party.
Let's start with the Republicans. Hawley's AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act, which outlaws the use of legally acquired copyrighted materials for AI training without the copyright holder's permission, is co-sponsored by Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Peter Welch of Vermont. The bill is perhaps a response to Bartz v. Anthropic, which found Anthropic did not violate the Copyright Act by training its LLM on legally acquired copyrighted works. (Anthropic was found guilty of copyright infringement for using over 7 million copies of copyrighted books illegally acquired from pirate sites.) If enacted, the bill would cripple AI developers, which depend on public and legally purchased private data to train their increasingly sophisticated models.
Hawley's Artificial Intelligence Risk Evaluation Act, co-sponsored again by Blumenthal, would require AI developers to turn over detailed information about their frontier LLMs to the Energy Department before their deployment, letting the department mull whether various "adverse scenarios" are likely. If the department decides such events are probable enough, it would be allowed to nationalize the technology. Talk about discouraging innovation: Fewer people will want to advance the technological frontier if the government has the right to take any company whose product is toogood.
Of the current crop of AI bills, Hawley's GUARD Act is the one that's most likely to become law. It's co-sponsored by 12 senators: Blumenthal, Welch, Katie Britt (R–Ala.), Tom Cotton (R–Ark.), Ruben Gallego (D–Ariz.), Maggie Hassan (D–N.H.), Mark Kelly (D–Ariz.), James Lankford (R–Okla.), Mike Lee (R–Utah), Chris Murphy (D–Conn.), Mark Warner (D–Va.), and Catherine Cortez Masto (D–Nev.). The legislation would not only ban chatbots that produce sexually explicit content for minors; it would outlaw the provision of any AI companion to minors whatsoever.
To comply with this wide-reaching regulation, chatbot companies would be required to freeze every user account, which they could unfreeze only after users provide "age data that is verifiable using a reasonable age verification process." Such processes include providing government-issued ID or biometric data to AI companies, which "means every chatbot interaction could feasibly be linked to your verified........