There’s a certain art to political leverage. You find something your opponents value, threaten it, and watch them make concessions. Trump has mostly been an expert at this. But generally, the mob boss doesn’t threaten to burn down his own restaurant.

I mention this because the Trump administration has just announced they will soon pass an executive order on AI that primarily threatens to withhold rural broadband funding from red states, has provoked open revolt from a wide swath of Republican federal and state representatives, and exists to benefit San Francisco AI companies whose employees vote approximately 90% Democratic.

The optics aren’t great.

I. For Those Just Tuning In

The AI industry has wanted federal preemption of state AI laws since state laws were a twinkle in ambitious state legislators’ eyes. The pitch is simple: fifty different regulatory regimes are a compliance nightmare, multiple states will pass different and overly burdensome requirements, and if we slow down, China wins.

Yet most people in the AI safety world would also prefer a coherent federal framework. A well-designed national standard beats fifty state-level experiments. To be clear: the disagreement isn’t federal versus state. It’s state standards versus federal nothing.

The AI lobby, represented most visibly by the $100+ million Leading the Future super PAC backed by Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, claims its goal is a unified national framework. But in three attempts at preemption, they have proposed exactly zero federal standards to replace the state laws they want to eliminate. Every single push has been pure preemption: stop the states, replace them with nothing, figure out the details later. Or hopefully never.

Luckily, “trust us, we’ll write the rules eventually” turns out to be a hard sell. The first attempt was stripped out of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” by a 99-1 Senate vote. The second attempt, which failed to be smuggled into the must-pass NDAA last week, collapsed when even House Republican leadership couldn’t hold the votes.

So now we’re on attempt three: the executive order. When you’ve lost 99-1 in the Senate and can’t get your provision into a defense bill that has to pass, the natural next step is to try doing the same thing unilaterally and hope you can bully states into compliance before the courts notice.

On Monday, Trump announced he would sign a “ONE RULE” executive order on AI. His Truth Social post warned that “overregulation by the States” threatens the “HOTTEST” economy in the world, complained about “Woke AI,” and cautioned that “AI WILL BE DESTROYED IN ITS INFANCY” if we allow “50 States, many of them bad actors” to regulate.

The leaked draft reveals three mechanisms: a DOJ Litigation Task Force to sue states over AI laws; funding threats making states with “onerous” AI laws ineligible for portions of the $42.45 billion BEAD broadband program; and agency rulemaking directing the FCC and FTC to create federal standards that preempt state rules.

To be clear, “minimally burdensome” here means “no regulation.” The EO does not propose any federal standards to replace the state laws it wants to eliminate. They’re pre-emptively removing rules, with no plan for what comes after.

II. The “One Rulebook” That Doesn’t Exist

White House AI Czar David Sacks posted a defense Monday afternoon, framing this as a simple question of jurisdiction. AI crosses state lines, so it’s interstate commerce, so only the federal government should regulate it.

This is a reasonable-sounding argument attached to an unreasonable policy.

Yes, AI development crosses state lines. In today’s economy most things do, including pork production. The Supreme Court addressed this exact theory in 2023 and rejected it. California can regulate pork sold in California even if Iowa farmers have to change their operations. Compliance costs affecting out-of-state businesses are not, by themselves, an unconstitutional burden (more on this a little later).

The deeper problem is simple: Sacks keeps invoking “One Rulebook” without acknowledging that the EO doesn’t create a rulebook. It creates mechanisms to eliminate state rules. These are different things. There is no “one rulebook.” There is “zero rulebooks, and we’ll sue you if you try to write one.”

Sacks attempts to address concerns about child safety, claiming “generally applicable state laws” are exempt. But who decides what counts as “generally applicable”? The same DOJ task force the EO creates to sue states? DeSantis has been explicit that preemption would prevent Florida from protecting children from predatory AI applications. One of them is wrong, and Sacks hasn’t explained why it’s DeSantis.

On censorship, Sacks argues Blue State AI laws are the real threat, and only federal action can stop it. But the EO doesn’t create any anti-censorship rules. It just removes everyone’s ability to regulate at all.

On competitiveness, Sacks warns China will race ahead if we’re mired in regulatory confusion. This might carry more weight if the same administration weren’t simultaneously considering selling China near-state-of-the-art Nvidia H200 chips (again .. more later). Apparently transparency requirements are an existential threat to American competitiveness, but almost state of the art chip exports are fine.

The tell is in what Sacks doesn’t say. He doesn’t describe what the “One Rulebook” actually contains. He doesn’t explain what federal standards will replace the state laws being eliminated. “One Rulebook” is an empty slogan, not a policy. The policy is simply no rulebook.

III. The Constitutional Problem

Con law 101: the federal government cannot preempt state law by executive order. This is Congress’s job. The President can direct executive agencies, command the military, and pardon turkeys. He cannot unilaterally void laws passed by state legislatures. Which is why the interest groups tried so hard at a legislative path when they could have got an executive order through six months ago.

But what you can do is create mechanisms to harass states until everyone gives up. But each mechanism has legal vulnerabilities. The dormant Commerce Clause theory was rejected in National Pork Producers v. Ross (2023). If it couldn’t save Iowa pig farmers from California’s pork preferences, it probably can’t save OpenAI from basic guardrails and transparency requirements. The funding threat faces Spending Clause problems; a federal court just ruled the administration can’t attach new conditions to highway grants that Congress hadn’t authorized.

If the legal theories were strong, they wouldn’t have tried to jump through all the legislative hoops. This is what “throwing things at the wall” looks like.

IV. Harming Your Own Voters

Now for the most confusing part.

The BEAD program exists to bring broadband to underserved, meaning rural, Americans. Alaska gets $1,387 per resident. West Virginia, Wyoming, Montana, and Mississippi all receive over $400 per resident. Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut get under $35 per resident.

The states with aggressive AI laws—California, New York, Colorado—are urban, coastal, and get almost nothing per capita from BEAD. The states that desperately need BEAD are deep red.

Threatening to withhold BEAD funding to punish AI regulation is threatening to take away broadband from your own voters to benefit companies in San Francisco. There may be a reason why many politically aware Republicans, who have shown a wide interpretation of deference in most other matters, have decided to grow a spine now.

An incomplete list of Republicans who have publicly opposed AI preemption: Ron DeSantis. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Josh Hawley. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Marco Rubio. Steve Bannon.

When this coalition, along with most liberals, agrees on anything, perhaps note the topic.

DeSantis called the effort “federal government overreach” and “a subsidy to Big Tech.” He’s counter-programming with his own “AI Bill of Rights” for Florida. When he shared the tragic story of a mother whose teenage son died by suicide after being assisted by an AI chatbot, it’s hard to spin “we need to stop states from preventing this” as a winning message.

Hawley offered the pithiest summary: “This shows what money can do.”

Over 200 state lawmakers sent letters opposing preemption. Thirty-six state attorneys general warned of “disastrous consequences.” This coalition includes people who agree on almost nothing else. Uniting them required a special kind of political own-goal.

V. Meanwhile, About That China Thing

The central argument for preemption has always been geopolitical: if we slow down, China catches up. This requires believing the administration is laser-focused on maintaining America’s AI advantage.

Which brings us to the other news that broke today: the White House is considering allowing exports of Nvidia H200 chips to China, hardware roughly 18 months behind the most advanced offerings.

To summarize the administration’s position: State laws requiring AI companies to publish safety reports are an existential threat to American competitiveness. But selling China near-state-of-the-art chips is a reasonable compromise.

The argument for preemption was never really about China. But it’s helpful when they make that obvious.

VI. Conclusion

The AI lobby wanted preemption. They have money. They have access. They got Trump to tweet about “ONE RULE” and warn that we’re losing to China.

What they didn’t get was a political coalition that could actually deliver.

The accelerationist argument has always been structurally simple: just say no. No regulations, no transparency requirements, no pre-deployment testing. In theory, “no” is easy to organize around.

NO

But “no” falls apart when your coalition includes Republican governors who need federal broadband money, MAGA populists who hate Big Tech, and state legislators who have to explain why AI chatbots are endangering children with federal blessing.

Congress rejected preemption 99-1. The NDAA effort collapsed. The executive order has provoked the President’s own allies into open revolt.

The accelerationists wanted to move fast and break things. They didn’t expect the first thing to break would be their own coalition.

There will be a fourth attempt. And a fifth. But each failure makes the next one harder to sell. Eventually, even the best-funded lobby has to reckon with the possibility that the problem isn’t the sales pitch …
…
maybe it’s just the product.