Legal experts: Trump AI order mostly 'political theater'

Legal experts said Thursday that President Donald Trump's executive order targeting state artificial intelligence regulations is largely "political theater" with limited immediate effect. Trump issued the order Thursday embracing the tech industry's position that AI regulation should occur at the national level rather than by states. The order directs federal agencies to identify state laws deemed "onerous" and creates a litigation task force to challenge them. It also threatens to withhold federal broadband funding and unspecified grants from states with such regulations. Gowri Ramachandran, director of elections and security at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's law school, said the order is vague about which state laws it targets and leaves enforcement decisions to various agencies. "A lot of the order is really political theater," Ramachandran said. "It strikes me as one of these press-release-as-executive-order situations," she said. Nicole Ozer, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Democracy at UC Law San Francisco, said much of the order's effectiveness depends on how agencies respond. "Much of the executive order is spectacle rather than substance at this point," she said. Experts noted federal agencies cannot target state laws without congressional authorization, and Congress has not passed significant consumer protection legislation for new technology in nearly 30 years.