Big Tech Is Losing It After One Congresswoman Killed Their AI Protection in the Dead of Night

Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang… name a tech CEO and odds are they haven’t clenched this hard since the 2021 antitrust hearings (aka the last time Congress remembered they existed). That’s because the Senate just executed their favorite part of Trump’s $3.3 trillion tax-and-spending bill… a decade-long ban on states regulating artificial intelligence. Yeah, that’s gone now.

(Source: Reuters)

In a late-night legislative marathon known as vote-a-rama (which sounds made up but sadly isn’t), the Senate voted 99-1 to kill the provision. It would’ve blocked states from passing their own AI rules for ten years. Instead, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle overwhelmingly agreed: maybe letting OpenAI roam free with zero local oversight isn’t such a great plan.

The lone holdout was Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina. He stood firm… apparently hoping that if you squint hard enough, “let’s keep states out of it” looks like innovation. Everyone else? Yeah, they weren’t buying it.

If you’re wondering why this is so important, originally, this AI moratorium was meant to give Big Tech a break from navigating 50 different state laws (heaven forbid they spend a few billion on legal teams instead of more AI labs). Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn and Texas’s Ted Cruz tried to strike a compromise… cutting the ban from 10 years down to 5, with carveouts for child safety and deepfake abuse. But by Monday night, Blackburn pulled the ripcord. In her words: “The current language is not acceptable to those who need these protections the most.” What she really wanted to say was: “Big Tech’s been wildin’ and we’re not giving them another free pass.”

She then teamed up with Democrat Maria Cantwell to kill the moratorium completely. Blackburn even called the original language a "giveaway to tech companies" and “Section 230 on steroids.” Which, coming from a Republican senator, is like calling it the Nickelback of tech policy… no one wants to be associated with it anymore.

Make no mistake about it, this AI fight is just one piece of the larger mess that is Trump’s $3.3 trillion domestic agenda. The bill includes sweeping tax cuts, spending boosts (Elon’s not too fond of), and a whole bunch of policy riders (like this AI thing) that are now putting the whole thing at risk.

At the time of this writing, there are eight Republican senators still not on board. Trump can only afford to lose three of them. Two (Rand Paul and Thom Tillis) are already voting no. That means any additional defection could send this whole thing down faster than a company run by Sam Bankman Fried.

Chuck Schumer summed it up like only Chuck Schumer can: “The Republicans are still in disarray.” While I’ve got plenty of jokes for him, he’s not wrong. Trump’s been on Truth Social, furiously trying to rally support and warning that failure would mean “historic tax hikes.” But even some of his usual allies aren’t budging… especially when they’re being asked to sell out state rights in the name of AI (at least not everyone’s a sellout).

For Big Tech, this is a setback. Companies like Google, OpenAI, and Meta had lobbied hard for the moratorium, hoping to avoid a patchwork of local laws that could slow them down. But the Senate vote made one thing clear: Congress isn’t ready to hand Silicon Valley the keys to the future without at least some oversight.

Now, states can go back to crafting their own AI rules. Expect a flurry of new proposals covering everything from deepfake protections to biometric privacy to whatever weird thing Florida decides is urgent next.

Whether Trump’s massive bill actually makes it to his desk is still up in the air. But one thing’s clear: the plan to give Big Tech a decade-long hall pass on AI just hit a wall. And (for once) Congress didn’t flinch.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Google and Meta as mentioned in the article.