Democrats and Republicans Both Want To Regulate AI. They Just Can’t Agree on How.

As lawmakers of both major parties hustle to regulate their preferred villains, they're losing sight of the big picture. The possible gains to humanity from AI are enormous.

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At the federal level, Republican-written AI bills tend to be less concerned with policing how individuals use the technology than with regulating the development and deployment of the underlying technology—large language models (LLMs). Democrat-written bills tend to focus on individual malfeasance rather than the tech itself.

Accordingly, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) was so outraged last year by a (hilarious) deepfake of herself that she called on Congress to affirm "the right to demand that social media companies remove deepfakes of their voice and likeness." In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three bills in 2024 that restricted the use of AI to create political content deemed deceptive in advance of elections.

On the other side of the aisle, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) doesn't just want to ban driverless cars to protect unionized truck drivers from automation or ban minors from accessing AI companion chatbots; he wants frontier AI developers to submit their models to the Energy Department for potential nationalization before they're granted permission to deploy their models commercially.

But it's not like there's no overlap. Each of these bills is co-sponsored by at least one senator from the other party.

Let's start with the Republicans. Hawley's AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act, which outlaws the use of legally acquired copyrighted materials for AI training without the copyright holder's permission, is co-sponsored by Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Peter Welch of Vermont. The bill is perhaps a response to Bartz v. Anthropic, which found Anthropic did not violate the Copyright Act by training its LLM on legally acquired copyrighted works. (Anthropic was found guilty of copyright infringement for using over 7 million copies of copyrighted books illegally acquired from pirate sites.) If enacted, the bill would cripple AI developers, which depend on public and legally purchased private data to train their increasingly sophisticated models.

Hawley's Artificial Intelligence Risk Evaluation Act, co-sponsored again by Blumenthal, would require AI developers to turn over detailed information about their frontier LLMs to the Energy Department before their deployment, letting the department mull whether various "adverse scenarios" are likely. If the department decides such events are probable enough, it would be allowed to nationalize the technology. Talk about discouraging innovation: Fewer people will want to advance the technological frontier if the government has the right to take any company whose product is toogood.

Of the current crop of AI bills, Hawley's GUARD Act is the one that's most likely to become law. It's co-sponsored by 12 senators: Blumenthal, Welch, Katie Britt (R–Ala.), Tom Cotton (R–Ark.), Ruben Gallego (D–Ariz.), Maggie Hassan (D–N.H.), Mark Kelly (D–Ariz.), James Lankford (R–Okla.), Mike Lee (R–Utah), Chris Murphy (D–Conn.), Mark Warner (D–Va.), and Catherine Cortez Masto (D–Nev.). The legislation would not only ban chatbots that produce sexually explicit content for minors; it would outlaw the provision of any AI companion to minors whatsoever.

To comply with this wide-reaching regulation, chatbot companies would be required to freeze every user account, which they could unfreeze only after users provide "age data that is verifiable using a reasonable age verification process." Such processes include providing government-issued ID or biometric data to AI companies, which "means every chatbot interaction could feasibly be linked to your verified identity," warns the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

That isn't a risk too small to worry about. AU10TIX, a third-party identity verification software used by TikTok, Uber, and X, recently left such personal identifiable information exposed for over a year.

Hawley's AI-Related Job Impacts Clarity Act, co-sponsored by Warner and Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Va.), is superficially innocuous: It would require all publicly traded companies to submit quarterly reports to the Labor Department on the number of employees fired, hired, and retraining "substantially due to the replacement or automation by artificial intelligence." That phrase is ambiguous, but the senators' motive is not: They want to render AI's labor market effects legible so that the government can more easily interfere with private business decisions.

On the Democratic side, Sen. Dick Durbin (D–Ill.) has given us the DEFIANCE Act, which passed the Senate by unanimous consent in January and is being championed in the House by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.). The bill would make it a civil offense to create digital forgeries "depicting intimate activity or nudity." While this legislation does not impose liability on AI companies for individuals' odious misuse thereof, another Durbin bill would do that: The AI LEAD Act, introduced in September and co-sponsored solely by Hawley, would make deployers and developers liable when a user's application of an AI system "causes harm."

Hawley frames the AI LEAD Act as empowering parents to bring suits against Big Tech when "AI products harm…their children," but virtually any product imaginable can be used maliciously. Surely, Hawley would balk at holding firearm manufacturers liable when their products are used to murder innocents instead of protecting them. The principle that people are responsible for malign misuses of tools applies to AI just as strongly as it does to firearms or any other thing that can be used to injure a person.

Unlike the AI LEAD Act, the NO FAKES Act is actually viable. Introduced by Sen. Chris Coons (D–Del.), it has 11 co-sponsors, six of them Republicans. The bill is intended to protect "the voice and visual likeness of all individuals from unauthorized computer-generated recreations [using] generative artificial intelligence," according to Coons.

It's safe to say that nobody wants others creating and sharing photorealistic depictions of them doing disreputable things that they didn't actually do. But the NO FAKES Act goes beyond that, holding platforms "liable for hosting unauthorized digital replicas" and excluding digital replicas from protection under the First Amendment.

Sarah Montalbano, policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment, has explained how the NO FAKES Act would jeopardize creativity in the gaming industry. Penalties of up to $25,000, she wrote last year at Reason, "would fall hardest on small developers, hobbyists, and fan communities making non-commercial games or mods" and encourage developers to preemptively "restrict the range of faces, voices, and customizable features."

As lawmakers of both major parties hustle to name, shame, and regulate their preferred villains, they're losing sight of the big picture. The possible gains to humanity from AI are enormous. The AlphaFold AI system uses primary amino acid sequences to predict the 3D structure of proteins, cutting prediction times from years to hours and reducing the cost of early-stage drug discovery by anywhere from 30 percent to 70 percent. And it exists—in the words of Taylor Barkley, director of federal government affairs at the Abundance Institute—"because researchers were free to release and iterate on imperfect models in the open."

The AI LEAD Act would impose strict liability on developers of "unreasonably dangerous" AIs. This would have discouraged the kind of experimentation that produced AlphaFold, leaving "today's researchers without a tool that has accelerated drug discovery, structural biology, and our basic understanding of life," says Barkley.

Meanwhile, R-Super—a novel algorithm developed by Johns Hopkins University researchers—trains AI models to segment a tumor, a crucial step in cancer diagnosis and treatment, in one to two minutes instead of 30 minutes to an hour required by unassisted radiologists. The Energy Department has deployed AI to reduce the risk of outages by anticipating grid disruptions and improving load forecasting. Similarly, improved demand forecasting can reduce inventory and logistics costs by double-digit percentages. It has eased the stress on public defenders by reducing document review time by 63 percent. It helps researchers by translating papers from any language to any other language in mere minutes or even seconds, depending on the amount of data it has to sift through. It increased the speed of software development in one experiment by over 55 percent, and Anthro