The U.S. Senate voted 99-1 on Tuesday to remove a 10-year federal moratorium on state regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) from President Donald Trump’s megabill.
The 940-page “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” was passed Tuesday afternoon by the Senate, 51-50, with Vice President JD Vance casting the deciding vote. The bill now heads to the House of Representatives, which could vote on it as early as Wednesday.
Senators voted to erase the ban from the bill by adopting an amendment offered by Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., during a marathon session known as a “vote-a-rama.”
The Senate version of Trump’s legislation would have only restricted states regulating AI from tapping a new $500 million fund to support AI infrastructure.
Initially presented as a 10-year ban on states attempting to regulate AI, lawmakers later tied it to federal funding so that only states that backed off on AI regulations would be able to get subsidies for broadband internet or AI infrastructure. A last-ditch Republican effort to save the provision would have reduced the time frame to five years, but that effort was abandoned late Monday when Blackburn and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., introduced an amendment to strike the proposal entirely.
Blackburn said “it is frustrating” Congress has been unable to legislate on emerging technology, including online privacy and AI-generated deepfakes that impersonate an artist’s voice or visual likeness. States, by contrast, have passed laws that clamp down on deepfakes and other unwieldy aspects of AI.
“But you know who has passed it? It is our states,” Blackburn said. “They’re the ones that are protecting children in the virtual space. They’re the ones that are out there protecting our entertainers — name, image, likeness — broadcasters, podcasters, authors.”
For weeks, state and local lawmakers as well as safety advocates argued the 10-year ban was a gift to a booming industry that wants to avoid accountability for its products while pursuing adoption of AI agents, Generative AI, and training models that threaten to upend employment, established businesses, and the personal lives of millions of people.
Major AI companies such as OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, who supported an AI moratorium, have argued a patchwork of state and local AI laws is hindering progress in the AI industry and the ability of American firms to compete with China.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during a Senate hearing in May that “it is very difficult to imagine us figuring out how to comply with 50 different sets of regulation.”
