Donald Trump urges narrow AI regulation amid fierce Maga backlash

Donald Trump’s administration has urged Congress to pass narrow child safety and content laws to rein in AI, amid a fierce backlash against the technology from within the Maga coalition.

The unexpected move by the White House comes just days after Republican senator Marsha Blackburn released a draft of a more sweeping bill, which she claimed had the president’s backing. It would allow AI companies to be sued for certain harms.

The White House proposal calls for greater parental control over their children’s privacy and content setting in AI apps, as well as age verification, but warns against new state laws and urges “industry-led standards” instead of any new federal watchdog for the sector.

Trump, whose AI policy has been shaped by officials with close links to Silicon Valley, including venture capitalist turned White House adviser David Sacks, has favoured light-touch regulation of the industry.

But the president has struggled to convince large parts of his own party to fall in line. The administration last year twice tried to legislate to ban state-level AI regulations, but the measures failed amid opposition from Republican senators and governors.

Trump instead signed an executive order that threatened to withhold funding from states that continued to pass “onerous” AI laws.

A series of recent polls has shown that concern about data centres and the societal impact of AI is widespread among Trump voters. Republican legislators across the country have also been defying the president by introducing dozens of state-level bills to regulate the tech.

The four-page framework released on Friday focused on “protecting our children online, shielding families from higher energy costs, respecting creators’ rights and supporting American workers”, said Michael Kratsios, director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The framework mandates Congress to “empower parents and guardians with robust tools to manage their children’s privacy settings, screen time, content exposure and account controls”. It also calls for AI labs to establish “commercially reasonable” age verification.

AI labs have faced legal challenges from copyright holders, such as authors, for hoovering up content created by humans to train their models.

The Trump proposal backs the training of models with this content, but suggests Congress considers frameworks for copyright holders to “collectively negotiate compensation from AI providers”.

But it explicitly warns against creating “any new federal rulemaking body to regulate AI”, and says existing government watchdogs should oversee the sector “through industry-led standards”.

The framework was welcomed by lobbyists for the AI industry, who are fighting to stop a proliferation of state-level laws, but was criticised by some child-safety campaigners for offering inadequate safeguards.

Mackenzie Arnold, director of US policy at the Institute for Law & AI, said the framework was “clearer on what it doesn’t want than on what it does”.

He added that he was concerned that “the framework continues to treat governance and innovation as competing aims”.