The U.S. Senate recently voted 99-1 to remove a controversial 10-year moratorium on state artificial intelligence (AI) regulations from President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” The vote, held during a marathon session on July 1, 2025, marked a rare moment of overwhelming bipartisan agreement in the U.S. Senate, and it also marked a shift in how the rapidly growing AI technologies should be governed.
The moratorium, originally included in Trump’s tax policy bill, aimed to prevent states from enacting or enforcing their own AI regulations for a decade. Supporters of this moratorium argued this would avoid a patchwork of state laws that would stifle innovation and weaken America’s position in the global AI race, especially against competitors like China.
Critics, however, saw it as the creation of a regulatory vacuum that would leave consumers, workers, and the minorities vulnerable to unchecked AI risks. As previously reported by Phronews, one of the most vocal critics of the 10-year moratorium was Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, a leading AI research and safety company, and also the developer of the Claude AI assistant.
In an op-ed, Amodei calls the 10-year ban as at the time it was proposed, a “far too blunt an instrument.” Amodei, being at the helm of an AI research and safety company, admits that AI is growing at an unprecedented rate that can totally change the world for good in the next few years. However, he warns that the 10-year AI regulation moratorium will leave the development and usage of AI unchecked which will in turn have adverse effects on society.
And because the implementation of the 10-year ban wouldn’t immediately call for the creation of AI regulation at the federal level, he warns that, “Without a clear plan for a federal response, a moratorium would give us the worst of both worlds – no ability for states to act, and no national policy as a backstop.”
It is important to note that prior to the proposing and the inclusion of this bill into President Trump’s tax policy bill, there was no AI regulation neither at the federal level nor at the state level. So it makes sense that proposing a decade-long ban on State AI regulation when there’s no regulation at the federal level will result in a regulatory vacuum, where a new technology or industry emerges faster than laws or regulations can be developed to govern it.
It is probably with this realization that the Senate’s decision was bipartisan, where both Republican and Democratic senators voiced concerns about stripping states of their ability to respond to AI risks in real time. The final vote being 99-1 reflected rare unity in the U.S. Senate, especially on a tech policy issue.
Apart from this bipartisan opposition, there were also factors like state pressure and consumer rights advocacy that contributed to the dropping of the ban. When the moratorium was initially proposed, over 50 state attorneys and more than 250 state lawmakers signed letters urging Congress to preserve state authority over AI regulation. Activists groups also warned that a decade-long freeze would leave Americans exposed to dangers such as deepfakes, algorithmic discrimination and bias, as well as threats to children’s online safety.
With the cancellation of the ban, states in the U.S. now retain the authority to regulate AI as they see fit. At least 45 states have already introduced AI-related legislation, with 31 states addressing critical issues such as deepfake prevention and election integrity, employment discrimination in AI-powered hiring systems, consumer protection and transparency, children’s online safety, and artists’ rights and protection from unauthorized AI-generated content.
However, this vote does not end the current debate of federal regulation vs. state regulation. Many lawmakers and industry leaders, including Amodei, continue to call for comprehensive federal AI legislation. Tech giants like OpenAI and Google also argue that only a national framework can provide both the flexibility and the safeguards needed as AI technologies become more powerful and pervasive.
Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) summed up the evolving AI landscape with a post on X saying, “This [removal of the moratorium] allows us to work together nationally to provide a new federal framework on Artificial Intelligence that accelerates U.S. leadership in AI while still protecting consumers.”
