President Donald Trump’s executive order aiming to limit states from regulating AI independent of the federal government may seem like a pro-business move, but it could hurt development of responsible technology regulations happening locally, says a Northeastern AI expert
“At the end of the day, I’m not going to assume that states are going to hurt businesses,” said Usama Fayyad, Northeastern University’s senior vice president for AI and data strategy. “When a state does a restriction, there’s usually a good reason behind it, and it’s not like people in the federal government are all-knowing or better-knowing.”
The executive order — which will likely be challenged in the courts — establishes a new AI Litigation Task Force to be directed by the attorney general. The task force’s key responsibility will be challenging state AI laws that it deems are inconsistent with the administration’s new “minimally burdensome national policy framework for AI.”
State regulations create “a patchwork of 50 different regulatory regimes,” the Trump administration argued in the order it released this week, making compliance challenging and difficult to navigate, particularly for startup companies.
“To win, United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation. But excessive State [sic] regulation thwarts this imperative,” reads a portion of the executive order.
Usama Fayyad, Executive Director for the Institute of Experiential Artificial Intelligence, provides insights on Trump’s latest executive order on AI and the states. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
Additionally, the order calls on governmental agencies, including the Department of Commerce, the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission, to work in consultation with the administration’s special adviser for AI and crypto on evaluating current state laws regulating AI and their alignment with the policy outlined in the executive order.
The order is viewed as a win for the tech industry, particularly for AI companies like OpenAI, which have long lobbied for a national regulatory framework to supersede individual state AI laws.
Northeastern Global News spoke with Fayyad about the new executive order.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
As an AI expert, can you speak on the rationale behind establishing a national framework for AI development?
The rationale is simple — can you make the life of companies, researchers and, some might argue, consumers easier and simpler. You are avoiding a world where you can do something in one state that you can’t do in another state if you cross state lines. That’s the spirit. I’m not saying I agree with it or defend it. I’m just saying that’s the idea.
There’s a section in the order that provides carve-outs for AI laws regarding child safety, compute and data infrastructure, state government procurement and a few other areas. With that in mind, what impact do you think this executive order could have on the development of safe and responsible AI technologies going forward?
That’s hard to predict because one argument might say, OK this might stimulate even greater efforts to work toward defining a unified framework for what is responsible AI. What is ethical? What is not ethical? But history suggests the opposite.
History suggests that we learn a lot from different states coming up with different rules. I always like the example of California emission standards and certain requirements on automobiles. They were hated by the auto industry. They created a more complex environment. If you were to sell a car in California, it needs to have different standards.
But what happened was that because California was such a big part of the economy, it really ended up leading the federal government and other states to stop and say, “Wait a second, this makes sense. Let’s actually increase our burden on the requirements and standards.”
Congress has tried to pass similar measures like this in the past, but they haven’t passed. Executive orders are signed by the president but they don’t have the same weight as a law passed by Congress. How much legal strength does this order actually have?
It’s not a law, and it will get challenged. There may be a ruling that says this is unconstitutional and the president doesn’t have the power to do this as an executive order. … This is one of the beauties of the checks and balances in our system of governance. People can question. People can push back and people can reverse these executive orders.
In general, executive orders try to take advantage of the absence of clarity around a certain topic, and sometimes they are useful in that sense. But here it’s not clear there’s an absence.