Behind Silicon Valley and the GOP’s campaign to ban state AI laws
29 comments
·May 17, 2025mixologist
Thorrez
Is it your opinion that states should be allowed to regulate AI, but should not be allowed to regulate health?
I agree the GOP is being hypocritical. But I think a lot of other people are hypocritical in the opposite direction.
chneu
That's not at all what they're saying. By the GOPs logic there shouldn't be an either or decision here.
baq
Follow the money. Once you realize nothing makes sense, everything suddenly makes sense.
Gigachad
It’s because they are evil and almost everything they say is a lie. Then it makes sense.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF
Paraphrasing - Their one principle is that laws should protect them and bind everyone else, and not bind them, and not protect anyone else.
Everyone else is excuses as paper thin as a kid trying to get a cookie
vjvjvjvjghv
That's what you get when you run the government "like a business". Whoever pays, gets to play. The only exception are Christian churches who are also being listened to. Everybody else gets ignored.
latentcall
Starting to think software engineers and business executives are just about the worst thing to happen to this planet in a long time!
sph
How could you forget about career politicians?
Spivak
2025 has shown that there are things much worse than people whose entire career is decided to public service. I'll take 1000 career politician over one "business guy" any day.
The combination of being sure they know how the world works (like a business of course), surrounding themselves with sycophants, and being smart enough to convince themselves of anything which makes them get high off the smell of their own farts, leads to terrible garbage like our current administration.
8note
ai doesnt have to, and is trying to avoid carbon emissions.
the oil companies are still doing the worst, along with the oil burners like car and plane operators.
ai on nuclear or solar isnt doing much bad for the planet
Hikikomori
We getting ai on coal though.
treyd
We're getting AI on whatever form of energy is cheapest at the largest scales.
beej71
Does the federal government have the authority to enforce this?
nradov
Yes. This falls within the Constitution's interstate commerce clause.
LocalH
The Commerce Clause has been abused to control plenty of things that the states should have power over. Wickard v Filburn was one of the worst judicial decisions ever made.
glial
Can you help me understand? If state A decides to ban tobacco product B in their state, would that also fall under this clause, and therefore be subject to federal law on the matter?
recursivecaveat
For context, the first law to be struck down for overreaching the commerce clause since the 40s was one that prohibited the possession of a firearm within a school zone. All that was necessary to amend the law was to add a rider that it was only illegal if the gun had been bought/sold across state or international lines at some point.
The commerce clause is interpreted extremely broadly. It's basically unfixable though, because so many decades of laws rely on it, and passing a constitutional amendment to just directly grant the federal government a bunch of powers, even ones it already has, is politically impossible. (indeed passing any non-trivial amendment at all is very unlikely for the foreseeable future)
lightedman
Yes, and you can bet that the current admin is likely to use that to overturn things like California's ban on flavored tobacco products and similar things.
mindslight
It feels like these types of fundamental dynamics are the real underlying playing field here, and it needs to be shouted from the rooftops. Everyone keeps wondering what the Republicans' plan is for midterms, or in four years, for the obvious backlash when Trump's severe damage to our country becomes undeniable. As if we're merely going to have a "blue wave" that restores sanity [0], overcoming straightforward tactics like voter repression.
I think the actual goal is to destroy and sell off as much as possible of the government before then, turning what remains of democratic accountability into a noop - converting much of our society into foreign-owned "private property", making what core government functions remain effectively just hooks into unaccountable corporate services, and effectively cementing the corporate-authoritarian dystopia that we all thought we might have a chance of avoiding. We've been suffering the ratchet dynamic nibbling away at individual liberty for decades (alternating back and forth between corporate and government pushes), but I think "AI", cryptocurrencies, and filter bubbles have finally given these looters the gall to try kicking over the whole apple cart to divide amongst themselves.
[0] putting aside the whole Democrats talk a good game about chasing the corporate Road Runner but somehow never quite get him dynamic
vjvjvjvjghv
It looks like they will be successful. Democrats in Congress are a bunch of losers who aren't able to deal with this. I am not even sure if they want to.
maeil
They don't want to, and that's been clear for at least a decade.
sethammons
They wore pink that one time, so there is that
rcpt
The source of this article is a seriously anti-tech luddite.
"Silicon Valley" isn't aligned with the GOP on any issue but these guys just love it when a few VCs brains break because it gives them a chance to lump every engineer in with the maga chuds.
Jolter
The thing is the people backing this proposed rule are not exactly marginal players in SV. You can argue that most software engineers don’t agree with it, but you have to accept that who calls the shots in a big business venture is the leadership, not the software engineers.
Let me get this right… The same people who said that woman’s health should be left to individual states are now saying that AI shouldn’t be left to individual states.
Weird priorities.