Senator Ted Cruz once pushed an artificial intelligence policy so unpopular that not even he ended up voting in favor of it. Now he’s back with a plan to take on new AI regulation proposals in the coming weeks, though no one has any clue how he’s going to approach the matter.
Cruz gets to put a pretty big finger on the scale of how the federal government regulates AI, given that he’s the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee. And he’s reportedly weighing several proposed AI bills to decide which ones to advance to a markup session, where lawmakers will try to shape the legislation into something capable of winning bipartisan support and actually passing—a feat the Senate has largely failed to accomplish so far.
But no one has any idea what he’s actually going to bring to the table. According to a report from Politico, his own aides aren’t even sure. Senators on the Commerce Committee with Cruz also haven’t heard a peep from the chairman as to what he plans to bring to them, per the report. They don’t even know if he’s going to bring Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn’s agreement with the White House, which would slip a moratorium on states passing their own AI regulations into a bundle of online safety bills, including the controversial Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) that critics warn will restrict online speech and destroy online anonymity.
Cruz has already been down the state moratorium route, and it went about as poorly as such an effort possibly could. Last year, the Senator proposed a 10-year ban on states regulating AI as an amendment to Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. It was voted down 99-1, and the one in favor of the amendment wasn’t even Cruz. Republicans later tried to get the same restriction on states placed in the National Defense Authorization Act, but that also failed.
Would Cruz dare go down the route of the state-level moratorium again, knowing it’s so widely reviled that it actually delayed Republicans voting on a bill central to Trump’s agenda and another for national defense, and the general public opposes it by a 3-to-1 margin? Maybe! He’s not exactly a person concerned with being popular. If he were, he wouldn’t show his face in public nearly as much as he does.
Cruz has largely warned against any sweeping regulation, and his staff reportedly signaled to Politico that he’ll probably focus on “targeted” action in “truly novel circumstances.” But at least one Republican seems to think Cruz’s views on AI have shifted in the last year. “He originally had the position that we didn’t need to adopt any AI legislation whatsoever — that we should just allow the market to work,” Rep. Todd Young (R-Ind.), a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, told Politico. “My sense is he has adopted a different position now, and I’m gratified by that.”
Another Republican, John Curtis of Utah, told Politico the issue is complicated because “There’s not a lot of consensus” on AI regulation. Which isn’t really true—the public broadly supports restrictions and protections as it relates to AI. It’s just that Cruz, Curtis, and other Republicans are on the wrong side of that consensus.
