Republican Governor of Arkansas Sarah Huckabee Sanders is calling on her GOP colleagues to remove one part of President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill.”
According to her column in the Washington Post, “There is one very small portion of the bill that was added by Congress that would have unintended consequences and threatens to undo all the great work states have done to protect our citizens from the misuse of artificial intelligence.”
She said the bill in its current form would ban “state-level AI protections” for 10 years.
States across America (like Arkansas, Tennessee, Illinois, and Utah) have already taken action against AI. This includes passing laws which protect copyright and real people from AI's sexually explicit images being made of them.
Huckabee Sanders believes these laws are “changes that every state and Congress should get behind.”
“Americans are at risk from bad actors in the AI industry until lawmakers are allowed to establish basic rules and fairness — and 10 years is too long to wait,” Huckabee Sanders affirmed before calling the proposal to remove states' rights “the antithesis of what our founders envisioned when they established our federal system.”
The governor then warned how AI could be used by the United States' adversaries, like China, against American values.
She also suggested, instead of this AI legislation, Congress should take more action against China by following her state's lead, “kicking a Communist Chinese-affiliated company off our farmland,” and banning all Chinese-owned companies from owning property around critical infrastructure and military bases.
“As we compete with China, we cannot sacrifice the health, safety, and prosperity of our own people,” Huckabee Sanders said. “We must curb AI’s worst excesses while also encouraging its growth, which is exactly what states have done through the creation of their own regulatory frameworks.”
She ended her column by affirming the rights of every state: “Congress should continue to allow states to function as the laboratories of democracy they were intended to be.”