By Arvind Salem ‘28, Evan Kim ‘28, and Nason Li ‘29

As developments in the artificial intelligence sector continue to flourish and transform economies, workplace dynamics, and everyday life, questions on the regulation of AI are at the forefront of political debate. In response to these changes, in December of 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence.” 

For context, President Trump’s previous actions on AI have had similar goals. In January of 2025, he revoked President Biden’s “onerous” executive order focused on safe and secure use of AI. In July 2025, his administration released an AI Action Plan focused on the pillars of accelerating innovation, building Infrastructure, and international diplomacy, and issued an executive order on “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government.” 

The most recent order on AI aims to initiate a more universal regulatory structure for AI developments in hopes of catalyzing freer innovation and growth in the sector. Currently, what the order claims to be “excessive State regulation” has created a “patchwork” of differing regulations that make it difficult for US companies to grow their artificial intelligence efforts. A nationwide framework set by the Trump Administration would hope to break down these barriers. Additionally, the order claims that state laws are “increasingly responsible for requiring entities to embed ideological bias within models,” leading to false responses, and that certain states are unconstitutionally regulating beyond their borders and inhibiting interstate commerce. Considering this, the administration would like to work with Congress to create a “minimally burdensome” national regulatory framework that states’ laws cannot conflict with. This national framework aims to ensure the United States’ victory in the “AI race.” 

Fundamentally, the order is geared towards ensuring a uniform national framework on AI regulation and targets regulations on the state level that the administration views as too burdensome and hampering AI innovation. While laws already enacted in the states are not directly overruled by the executive order, the order does mobilize the executive branch to influence states to adopt policies favored by the administration and preempt additional regulation. 

The order activates multiple parts of the executive branch to achieve its goal, which includes:

• The Attorney General will create an AI litigation task force to challenge laws that the administration regards as overly burdensome and inconsistent with their national goals 
• The Secretary of Commerce will issue a note proclaiming that states with “onerous AI laws” are ineligible for remaining federal grants (an example is funding for broadband) and refer onerous laws to the AI litigation task force. 
• Directing the Special Advisor for AI and Crypto and the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology to create legislation that would be a national framework for AI, which, if passed, would override any conflicting State AI laws. 
• Preempting conflicting state laws through the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), determining whether to adopt a federal reporting/ disclosure standard for AI models, and the FTC outlining guidelines that would preempt state laws that require alterations to “truthful” AI outputs.

The order effectively also extends this to all other executive departments and agencies with discretionary grant programs. To the Trump administration, the United States’ loose and oftentimes draconian anti-AI laws are hurting American innovation in the long term. He views varying state laws and the continued protections of Biden-era AI orders and programs as extremely harmful to American innovation and economic growth. 

Although the long-term impacts of this executive order are hard to predict, it is clear that significant opposition has arisen. Critics argue that by pushing the Federal Government (and in extension, his own will) on the states, Trump risks pushing the American tech industry into a dangerous era of mismanagement. With the rise of AI image generation without consent and the simultaneous decline in personal privacy on the internet, Trump’s order rolls back already-limited consumer protections against the overreach of AI companies and their LLMs–presenting an unfortunate trade-off to the average American. It may be true that rolling back AI regulation could bring significant economic benefits to the United States, but those benefits could come at an even greater cost to average Americans’ privacy, benefiting only the wealthiest few who could afford to invest billions in the world’s largest AI companies. 

It also presents a challenge to states’ rights to regulate technology within their own borders. Per the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution, federal law will override any potential state law on nearly any issue. And although Trump’s order is not a federal law per se, it sets the stage for a future battle over tech regulation between Washington, D.C., and the states.