Senate Votes 99–1 To Remove AI Moratorium from ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’
The Senate removed the AI moratorium provision from the reconciliation bill in a 99–1 vote early Tuesday morning. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.) and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D–Wash.) co-sponsored the amendment to eliminate the provision after Blackburn reneged on a compromise with Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) to amend it over the weekend.
The Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee released the text of its original AI moratorium provision on June 5. This earlier version imposed a 10-year period during which $500 million of newly appropriated Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) funding for “the construction and deployment of infrastructure for the provision of artificial intelligence models” could be withheld from states found “limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models” by the commerce secretary. Last week, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the moratorium satisfied the Byrd rule, which allows only budget issues to be considered in reconciliation text, after the committee specified that it would not condition all $42 billion of BEAD funding appropriated in the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law on the nonenforcement of state-level AI laws.
Still, intraconservative debates about the AI moratorium continued.
Blackburn did “not want the moratorium to apply to state laws affecting recording artists…and laws affecting child sexual abuse material,” explained the Inst
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