By David Morgan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The Republican-led U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to remove a 10-year federal moratorium on state regulation of artificial intelligence from President Trump’s sweeping tax-cut and spending bill.
Lawmakers voted 99-1 to strike the ban from the bill by adopting an amendment offered by Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn. The action came during a marathon session known as a “vote-a-rama,” in which lawmakers offered numerous amendments to the legislation that Republicans eventually hope to pass.
Republican Senator Thom Tillis was the lone lawmaker who voted to retain the ban.
The Senate version of Trump’s legislation would have only restricted states regulating AI from tapping a new $500 million fund to support AI infrastructure.
Major AI companies, including Alphabet’s Google and OpenAI, have expressed support for Congress taking AI regulation out of the hands of states to free innovation from a panoply of differing requirements.
Blackburn presented her amendment to strike the provision a day after agreeing to compromise language with Senate Commerce Committee chair Ted Cruz that would have cut the ban to five years and allowed states to regulate issues such as protecting artists’ voices or child online safety if they did not impose an “undue or disproportionate burden” on AI.
But Blackburn withdrew her support for the compromise before the amendment vote.
“The current language is not acceptable to those who need these protections the most,” the Tennessee Republican said in a statement.
“Until Congress passes federally preemptive legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act and an online privacy framework, we can’t block states from making laws that protect their citizens.”
(Reporting by David Morgan, Editing by William Maclean and Alex Richardson)
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