Draft document obtained by POLITICO calls for task force and multi-agency approach.
The White House is preparing to issue an executive order as soon as Friday that enlists the power of the federal government to block states from regulating artificial intelligence, according to four people familiar with the matter and a leaked draft of the order obtained by POLITICO.
The draft document, confirmed as authentic by three people familiar with the matter, would launch several efforts to challenge state AI laws — including an “AI Litigation Task Force” run by the Department of Justice.
The order plays into a contentious national debate over whether Washington or state capitals should set the direction of national AI policy. The industry and its Republican supporters argue that existing and future state laws on AI could lead to a conflicting “patchwork” that slows innovation.
A congressional effort to block state AI laws as part of the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act collapsed this summer amid Republican infighting.
This week, the prospect of an AI moratorium surfaced again in Congress — possibly incorporated into the year-end annual defense bill. President Donald Trump threw his weight behind the legislative effort in a post on Tuesday.
The executive order would be a different approach, deploying the muscle of several federal agencies to quash state AI regulations.
Government lawyers would be directed to challenge state laws on the grounds that they unconstitutionally regulate interstate commerce, are preempted by existing federal regulations or otherwise at the attorney general’s discretion.
The task force would consult with administration officials, including the special adviser for AI and crypto — a role currently occupied by investor David Sacks — to determine which state AI laws would be worth challenging, according to the document.
It is possible that the final order could look different, or that the White House could ultimately decide against its release. Reached for comment, a White House official said that until an executive order is “officially announced” by the White House, “discussion about potential executive orders is speculation.”
The executive order, in the draft obtained by POLITICO, would also empower Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to publish a review of “onerous” state AI laws within 90 days and restrict federal broadband funds to states whose AI laws are found to be objectionable. It would direct the Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether state AI laws that “require alterations to the truthful outputs of AI models” are blocked by the FTC Act.
And it would order the Federal Communications Commission and Sacks to begin looking into whether to adopt a new federal AI rule — a reporting and disclosure standard for AI models that would preempt conflicting state laws.
The apparent plan to wield the power of multiple federal agencies against state AI laws comes in the middle of a campaign by congressional Republicans and White House officials to insert a moratorium into the year-end defense bill. That campaign is being cheered on by tech lobbyists, who worry that a patchwork of conflicting state AI rules would be difficult to comply with.
At an event on Wednesday, Trump said it would be a “disaster” for 50 states to regulate AI, “because then you would have one ‘woke’ state.”
Republicans like Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz, chair of the Commerce Committee, have repeatedly warned that allowing blue states to regulate the technology would lead to “woke” AI models.
Some concerned about Republicans’ earlier preemption push are already raising questions about the legality of the draft executive order.
Mackenzie Arnold, director of U.S. policy at LawAI and an attorney who analyzed the failed moratorium, argued that states have the authority to regulate technology within their borders and that the laws passed so far don’t run afoul of federal powers under the Commerce Clause.
“The EO is an instruction to look into this, but there’s a chance that if the task force interprets that instruction very broadly, they won’t have the better argument,” he told POLITICO. “It remains to be seen how they’ll actually act on that.”
State legislators are also pushing back against the draft order.
Trump “has no power to issue a royal edict canceling state laws,” said California State Sen. Scott Wiener, author of a new AI safety law in California that the order appears to reference.
Chase DiFeliciantonio contributed to this report.