Trump Administration Unveils National AI Policy: States Blocked from Regulating AI

The Trump administration on Friday unveiled its seven-point national AI legislative blueprint. The core message is unambiguous: federal authority should govern AI policy, and states should be barred from enacting rules that interfere with "the national strategy to achieve global AI dominance."

What Does the Plan Say?

The key points of the legislative framework:

• Block state AI regulation: Congress encouraged to preempt state-level AI laws
• Child protection: Age verification and stricter requirements for AI services accessed by minors
• Copyright: Wait-and-see approach on whether AI training on copyrighted material is legal
• Energy: Action to prevent AI infrastructure from spiking electricity costs
• Skills: Youth development and AI familiarity training
• Consumer protection: Avoids "ambiguous standards about permissible content"
• AI dominance: All measures aimed at securing US global leadership in AI

No Law Yet

The plan has no legal force until Congress adopts it as legislation. The entire document and its provisions are recommendations — but the direction signals where US AI policy is heading under the current administration.

What This Means for Global CIOs

The US-EU divergence is crystallizing. While the US deregulates, the EU tightens through the AI Act. Companies operating across the Atlantic now face two fundamentally different regulatory regimes — raising the stakes for compliance strategy and enterprise AI governance.

This is a pivotal moment: the regulatory fork between the world's two largest economic blocs has arrived.