Washington, D.C. — On Monday, Demand Progress and more than 140 organizations, including tech workers, teachers, artists and civil society groups, sent a letter asking House leaders to reject a proposal to block enforcement of all state and local AI laws. The provision, part of the massive reconciliation bill, would preempt state and local laws governing AI for 10 years. In their letter, the groups warn that preempting state and local efforts to make AI safer removes accountability for a still-in-development technology that should not be allowed to make unfettered life-or-death decisions about our safety, our health, our freedoms, our employment and more.
Signers include the Alphabet Workers Union, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, Public Citizen, the American Federation of Musicians, Mozilla, the American Federation of Teachers and more.
“Protections for civil rights and children’s privacy, transparency in consumer-facing chatbots to prevent fraud, and other safeguards would be invalidated, even those that are uncontroversial,” the letter states. “The resulting unfettered abuses of AI or automated decision systems could run the gamut from pocketbook harms to working families like decisions on rental prices, to serious violations of ordinary Americans’ civil rights, and even to large-scale threats like aiding in cyber attacks on critical infrastructure or the production of biological weapons.”
“The AI preemption provision is a dangerous giveaway to Big Tech CEOs who have bet everything on a society where unfinished, unaccountable AI is prematurely forced into every aspect of our lives,” said Demand Progress Corporate Power Director Emily Peterson-Cassin. “Speaker Johnson and Leader Jeffries must listen to the American people and not just Big Tech campaign donations. State laws preventing AI from encouraging children to harm themselves, making uninformed decisions about who gets health care and creating nonconsensual deepfakes will all be wiped away unless Congress reverses course.”