AINEWS
Ted Cruz Holds the Gavel on Federal AI Rules. His Own Aides Can't Say What He'll Do With It.
As chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, Ted Cruz now controls which AI bills move.
As chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, Ted Cruz now controls which AI bills move.
Ted Cruz is the gatekeeper for federal AI legislation, and nobody, including his own staff, appears to know what he will do with that power.
As chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, Cruz controls which of several AI bills reach a markup session, the committee vote where senators rewrite legislation before it can hit the floor. According to Politico, neither his committee colleagues nor his own aides have been told which bills he intends to advance in the coming weeks.
That opacity matters because the pipeline is unusually full. The most concrete vehicle on the table is a package Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) is negotiating with the White House that would bundle the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), an online safety bill that has long drawn First Amendment objections, with a federal moratorium on state AI laws, a Washington ban that would block states from passing their own AI regulations. The Hill reported on the emerging bipartisan deal this month. Other proposals Cruz is weighing include the NO FAKES Act, which targets AI-generated impersonations of real people, and the bipartisan CHATBOT Act, which Cruz co-sponsored with Sens. Brian Schatz (D-HI), John Curtis (R-UT), and Adam Schiff (D-CA) to give parents controls over minors' use of AI chatbots (Senate Commerce Committee).
The aggressive version of this approach has already collapsed once. In 2019, Cruz authored the ROUTERS Act, an AI disclosure bill so broadly opposed that he declined to vote for it on the Senate floor and it was withdrawn before a final vote, according to Gizmodo. Earlier in this Congress, an amendment Cruz backed to bar states from passing their own AI laws lost on the Senate floor 99-1, with Cruz as its lone supporter. The pattern is documented: roughly three out of four senators from both parties have already voted against letting Washington preempt state AI rules.
Cruz has telegraphed where his instincts point. In his AI Policy Framework, published by the Senate Commerce Committee, Cruz calls for a light-touch federal approach that prioritizes American AI leadership over what he describes as fragmented state regulation. The Trump administration is separately pursuing a national AI standard that could preempt state rules, per Roll Call. The legislative math has not moved with him: the Senate has failed to pass any standalone AI bill this Congress.
What to watch next is which bundle, if any, Cruz puts on the committee calendar. If he advances the Blackburn-White House deal pairing KOSA with a state AI moratorium, that package arrives carrying a 99-1 scar and a kids-safety sweetener that is its only apparent bipartisan lifeline. If he splits KOSA from preemption, he trades leverage for a narrower bill that can move on its own merits. If he sidesteps preemption altogether and advances the CHATBOT Act alone, the markup becomes a test of whether bipartisan kids-AI rules can pass without a controversial federal ban on state laws attached. Each path is a different answer to whether this Congress will produce any federal AI law at all.