WASHINGTON—In response to Senator Marsha Blackburn’s discussion draft of The Republic Unifying Meritocratic Performance Advancing Machine Intelligence by Eliminating Regulatory Interstate Chaos Across American Industry Act (TRUMP AMERICA AI Act), the Center for Data Innovation released the following statement from Senior Policy Manager Hodan Omaar:
The discussion draft is less a legislative foundation for governing AI and more a mood board for a set of long-standing grievances with Big Tech. The backronym is strained, but the policy is even worse—forcing together weak ideas to advance a political agenda rather than meaningfully solving a policy problem.
The draft aggregates many heavy-handed, innovation-constraining policy ideas for regulating AI systems, particularly on liability, content, and platform obligations, and packages them into a flawed federal framework. Many of the constituent bills raise serious concerns on their own, and combined they only make matters worse.
The United States has a well-established approach to emerging technology: permissive by default, targeted where necessary, and skeptical of regimes that treat every actor and every use case the same way. That light-touch approach is what produced the enormous economic and social gains of the Internet economy, as well as the increases in productivity, access to information, and democratization of opportunity. The same stakes for AI are at least as large.
Both the House and the Senate have spent months developing bipartisan proposals for how to best position the United States to benefit from AI. It should continue to focus on advancing ideas from that process, as well as supporting the AI Action Plan, rather than taking a step backwards with this proposal.
Contact: Nicole Hinojosa, press@datainnovation.org
