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President Trump has come out swinging against a Utah bill that would require large artificial intelligence companies to implement public safety and child protection plans.
“We are categorically opposed to Utah HB 286 and view it as an unfixable bill that goes against the Administration’s AI Agenda,” the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs said in a terse Feb. 12 memo of opposition to the bill sent to Republican leadership in the Utah state Legislature.
The measure, HB 286, the Utah AI Transparency Act, applies specifically to big developers of frontier AI models.
It requires AI developers to prepare a public safety plan for catastrophic risks and prepare a child protection plan.
Backers of the bill rapped Trump for trying to kill oversight of AI.
“It’s dissapointing that the first we’re hearing of [Trump tech adviser] David Sacks’ team going after state Al legislation is them opposing overwhelmingly popular legislation in a red state like Utah,” said Utah parent Mellisa McKay, president at the Digital Childhood Institute.
“Their flat opposition makes clear that this is about industry’s desire to operate with no rules and as little accountability as possible, even when that means opposing legislation that would protect Utah families like mine,” she said.
For months Trump has made clear he prefers “One Rulebook” nationally for regulating artificial intelligence rather than letting individual states set up a labyrinth of different and more onerous rules.
He signed an executive order in December to discourage states from passing AI legislation.
The move came after similar efforts to pass a moratorium on state-level AI regulation repeatedly failed in Congress.
Efforts to pass the AI moratorium on the GOP’s marquee One Big Beautiful Bill Act and in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) late last year ultimately failed after too many Republicans defected.
Under Trump’s executive order, the president tasked Attorney General Pam Bondi with setting up an “AI litigation task force” to target states that develop rules for the nascent technology that split from his national standard.
“There must be only One Rulebook if we are going to continue to lead in AI,” Trump explained on Truth Social last year.
“We are beating ALL COUNTRIES at this point in the race, but that won’t last long if we are going to have 50 States, many of them bad actors, involved in RULES and the APPROVAL PROCESS,” he said.
Trump has maintained that triumphing in the AI race over China is paramount to US national security and economic interests.
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