California’s First Amendment Pushes to Regulate AI as Trump Threatens to Block Regulations

California First Lady Jennifer Seibel Newsom recently convened a meeting that might land her in one of the most food-inducing nightmare scenarios for Silicon Valley’s tech fraternity — a group of the Golden State’s smartest, most powerful women pushing the brain to organize artificial intelligence.

Regulation is the last thing this particular California-dominated industry wants, and it’s spent a lot of money in state and federal capitols to prevent it — including funding President Trump’s new ballroom. Rules by a group of women, mostly mothers, with benefits for our children, when it comes to anxiety?

I’ll let you find out how popular this prospect is with the Elon Musks, Peter Thales and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world.

But as Sybil Newsom said, “If a platform reaches a child, it has a responsibility to protect that child. Period. The safety of our children is never second to the bottom line.”

agreed

Sable Newsom’s push for California to regulate AI comes at the same time that Trump is threatening to block states from overseeing the technology — and is accelerating a national effort that will open American coffers to AI moguls for decades to come.

Right now, the United States is facing its own disaster scenario: the most powerful and world-changing technologies we’ve ever seen in our lifetimes have been developed and unleashed under no rules or restrictions by people who seek personal gain from the results.

To put it simply, the plan now seems to be that these tech barons will change the world because they see fit to make money for themselves, and we as taxpayers will pay them to do it.

“When decisions are primarily driven by power and profit rather than care and responsibility, we completely lose our way, and given the current alignment between the tech titans and the federal administration, I believe we’ve lost our way,” said Sybil Newsom.

As for what’s going on so far, Trump recently tried to enshrine a 10-year ban on states’ ability to regulate the industry in his mockingly named “Big Beautiful Bill,” but it was pulled by a bipartisan group in the Senate — an early indicator of how burning the issue is.

Faced with this unexpected ban, Trump has threatened to sign a mysterious executive order that weakens the ability of states to regulate AI and withholds funds from those who try.

At the same time, the most enthusiastic and cowardly among congressional Republicans have proposed adding a 10-year ban to the next defense policy bill that will almost certainly pass. Of course, Congress has also refused to move toward any meaningful federal regulation on its own, while tech CEOs including Trump’s frenemy Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, Metta Zuckerberg and many others have been involved in interesting events at the White House.

That may be why this week, Trump announced the “Genesis mission,” an executive order that looks like it will take an unimaginable breadth of government research efforts across disciplines and turn them into a kind of AI model that will “revolutionize the way scientific research is done.”

While I’m sure nothing could possibly go wrong in this scenario, it’s not really the part that’s immediately alarming. Here it is: The project will be overseen by Michael Kratsius, Trump’s science and technology policy adviser, who has no science or engineering degrees but was previously a senior executive for Thiel and the former head of another AI company working on war-related projects with the Pentagon.

Kratsius is one of the main reasons Trump has embraced his second term with the same love that tech bros have. Genesis will certainly mean huge government contracts for these private sector “partners,” fueling the AI ​​boom (or bubble) with taxpayer dollars.

In the face of it all, Sable Newsom’s message is that we are not helpless—and California, home to many of these companies and itself the world’s fourth-largest economy, must have a say in how this technology advances, and make sure it does so in a way that benefits and protects us all.

“California is uniquely positioned to lead efforts in demonstrating innovation and responsibility and how they go together,” she said. “I’ve always believed that strong security is really good for business in the long run. Secure security means better results for customers and customer trust and loyalty.”

But the pressure to cave under the power of these companies is intense, as Sybil Newsom’s husband knows.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has tried over the past few years to push the needle on state legislation that would offer some form of oversight while allowing innovation that would properly keep California and the United States competitive on the global front. The tech industry has spent millions on lobbying, legal battles and pressure campaigns to water down even the most lucrative efforts, even threatening to leave the state if the regulations are implemented.

Last year, the industry tried unsuccessfully to stop Senate Bill 53, the landmark legislation signed by Newsom. It’s a basic transparency measure on “frontier” AI models that requires companies to have safety and security protocols in place and report known “catastrophic” risks, such as when those models show tendencies toward behavior that could kill more than 50 people — which they have, believe it or not.

But the industry was able to fend off further attempts. Newsom vetoed both Senate Bill 7, which would have required employers to notify workers when using AI in hiring and promotions; And Assembly Bill 1064, which would ban companion chatbot operators from making these AI systems available to minors if they can’t prove they won’t do things like encourage children to harm themselves, which those chatbots then do.

Still, California (along with New York and a few other states) is moving forward, and in a speech at the Sybil Newsom event, the governor said that last session, “we took a number of hits on this and we made a lot of progress.”

He promised more.

“We have the organization, we can create the future,” he said. “We have a special responsibility as it relates to these tools of technology, because it is the center of this universe.”

If Newsom moves forward, it will be in no small part because of Sybil Newsom, and women like her, who keep the pressure on the fight.

In fact, it was another powerful mother, first lady Melania Trump, who forced the federal government to take a small step this year when she championed the “Take It Down Act,” which requires tech companies to quickly remove objectionable explicit images. I honestly doubt her husband would have signed this particular bill without her request.

So, if we’re lucky, the efforts of women like Sybil Newsom might be some of the powerful intelligence needed to look at the world’s hegemonic notions of broligarchy.

Because tech bros are still not all-powerful despite their best efforts, and certainly not yet immune to the power of mothers.