{"id":2165,"date":"2026-06-16T01:18:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-16T01:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=2165"},"modified":"2026-06-16T01:18:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-16T01:18:09","slug":"ai-regulation-child-safety-kosa-congress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=2165","title":{"rendered":"Big Tech\u2019s desperate last push at AI regulation"},"content":{"rendered":"


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For months, Big Tech\u2019s Washington lobbyists have chased after the holy grail of pro-AI legislation: preemption. This would be a comprehensive federal law, passed in Congress and signed by the president, applying one set of AI rules across the entire country and overriding the legally messy state-by-state approach to regulation. For months, lobbyists have run into roadblocks and incurred nationwide political blowback, and they now face the possibility that after the midterms, Congress will flip to hostile Democrats unwilling to work with them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But their final, most desperate attempt at preemption is coming with new baggage, related to an entirely different fight in Congress that predates the public launch of ChatGPT: child safety.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Earlier this week, reports leaked that the White House had told child safety groups<\/a> and Big Tech companies that it would endorse a slate of children\u2019s online safety laws backed by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), the coauthor of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)<\/a>, as part of an overall preemption package. While the issue of online safety does meaningfully overlap with AI, it\u2019s only one facet of a much larger, complex set of issues that would need to be addressed in a truly comprehensive law: frontier model safety, discrimination, environmental impact, and so forth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Regardless, the potential deal has hit one snag: The White House had apparently not informed House Republicans, which had just passed their own version of KOSA, that it was going with Blackburn\u2019s legislation as a vehicle. Democrats who\u2019d worked with Blackburn on the Senate\u2019s flavor of KOSA were allegedly left out of the loop, too. On top of that, there was a separate, bipartisan-backed AI preemption bill currently floating around the House.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It resulted in a week of total confusion for backers of either policy: AI preemption and child safety might be lumped together in order to ensure preemption gets signed into law, but whose <\/em>version of child safety gets passed is unclear. Was it the Senate\u2019s stricter KOSA? Was it the looser version backed by House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA)? And where was the White House in all of this?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cNo one knows really who\u2019s driving this thing,\u201d a Republican lobbyist for a midsize tech company told The Verge.<\/em> \u201cEveryone is deeply, deeply, deeply skeptical of [the bill\u2019s] movement, because everyone is on such different pages. I think the House is not going to move anything that Blackburn wants.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Though the AI regulatory fight has caused huge fissures between GOP leadership and their populist members, President Donald Trump himself has called for the passage of an AI preemption bill<\/a>, meaning that the Republican Party must somehow make this happen. These days, the White House\u2019s policy wonks are trying to finesse a preemption approach influenced by Mike Davis, a Trump-allied lawyer and the founder of the Article III Project, who led a successful attempt to kill a different AI moratorium<\/a> in the Senate last year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Broadly speaking, to win Davis\u2019 approval, preemption law should meaningfully protect a set of values Davis called the \u201cFour Cs\u201d<\/a>: children, conservatives, creators, and communities. Some of those values were included in the White House\u2019s proposed draft of a comprehensive AI law<\/a>, released in March of this year, and the inclusion of KOSA satisfied the \u201cchildren\u201d requirement. But Davis told The Verge <\/em>that he wanted any legislation to address all four. \u201cThere is no chance in hell AI preemption will pass if it does not address the Four Cs. I will make damn sure of that. Again.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Getting KOSA passed, however, involves reconciling a massive difference between the House and Senate versions of the same bill. The Senate\u2019s version would require tech companies to assume a \u201cduty of care,\u201d<\/a> preemptive measures to protect young users, and would extend that responsibility to AI companies as well. However, the House version, spearheaded by Scalise, diluted that provision late last November, to the fury of child safety advocates<\/a>. The House\u2019s exclusion from the White House\u2019s discussions, therefore, was notable to onlookers. \u201c[Blackburn] genuinely does not want House KOSA,\u201d noted Michael Toscano, senior fellow and director of the Family First Technology Initiative for the conservative Institute for Family Studies.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Even if Trump were to whip the House Republicans into line, they\u2019d have another problem: the congressional Democrats, who\u2019d also learned of Blackburn\u2019s negotiations with the White House at the same time the House Republicans did. Though Senate KOSA was cosponsored by Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and overwhelmingly passed 91\u20133 in 2024, they had not been aware that their legislation would now be handcuffed to the unpopular goal of AI preemption. \u201cIf they [Blackburn and the White House] are looking at a standalone bill, it\u2019ll have to go through the Senate,\u201d said an AI policy advocate, noting that a new version of this bill would then require 60 votes \u2014 and therefore, Democrats \u2014 to pass.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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And even if the bill had some amount of popularity, the schedule might not allow for it. \u201cIt is mid June. You have a month and a half before people leave for [five-week] recess. And then it\u2019s [general] election season,\u201d said the AI policy advocate. \u201cThere\u2019s just no way.\u201d The remaining weeks on the legislative calendar are already being sucked up by more immediate matters: the renewal of FISA<\/a>, an immigration crackdown package, increased defense spending for Trump\u2019s war with Iran, a crypto market structure bill, affordability measures, and the controversial SAVE America election bill. Oh, and <\/em>the regular budget items like Medicaid.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Having preemption and KOSA chained together presents Big Tech with a difficult choice: Do they want a blanket federal AI preemption more than they want immunity from \u201cduty of care\u201d? And they don\u2019t have much time to make this choice, noted the Republican tech lobbyist, especially if Democrats take one chamber. \u201cAfter the election, what incentive do the Democrats have to support anything? Like, why wouldn\u2019t they say, \u2018Fuck you, we\u2019re gonna do our thing in the new Congress?\u2019 I\u2019m deeply skeptical.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Austin Carson, the former head of Nvidia\u2019s government relations operations and the founder of SeedAI, a nonprofit focused on increasing access to AI for local communities, was more dubious that the KOSA-preemption shotgun marriage of convenience would succeed. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine a scenario where [this bill] would move,\u201d he told The Verge.<\/em> \u201cI cannot imagine it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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