Ninety-nine senators found common ground in July 2025 that a decade-long freeze on state AI oversight went too far, and the 99-1 vote against the moratorium set the terms for a fight that consumed 2026 1. Washington kept pushing preemption anyway: a December 2025 executive order, a March 2026 legislative framework, and a pair of rival super PACs turned a procedural defeat into a running campaign, with OpenAI's Chris Lehane, Anthropic's Jack Clark, and a widening circle of policy chiefs steering their employers toward opposite corners of the ring 13.
A Moratorium Meets a Wall
House Republicans inserted a 10-year ban on state AI regulation into a tax-and-spending bill in May 2025, betting that a single federal standard would beat fifty competing ones 1. The Senate disagreed almost unanimously two months later, stripping the provision 99-1 and leaving states free to legislate on their own timelines 1. That vote followed President Trump's January 2025 executive order directing agencies to draft a national AI Action Plan, published later that summer as a roadmap organized around three pillars: accelerating innovation, building AI infrastructure, and leading internationally on diplomacy and security 2.
Congress handed the White House a procedural loss, yet the administration's underlying preference for a single federal rulebook survived the vote intact. Momentum shifted from legislative text to executive authority, a pivot that would define the fight's next phase.
Executive Orders Try Again
Trump signed Executive Order 14365, "Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence," in December 2025, an attempt to preempt state regulation through executive channels after Congress balked at doing so by statute 1. The White House followed in March 2026 with "A National Legislative Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence: Legislative Recommendations," handing Congress model language for a second legislative run at preemption 1.
Two attempts inside four months signal persistence rather than confidence. An executive order carries authority that skips congressional votes entirely, though it also carries vulnerability a statute avoids: courts, a future administration, or simple defiance from state attorneys general can unwind it far faster than they could unwind a law.
States Write Their Own Rules
California moved first among the large states, with Gov. Gavin Newsom signing the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, known as SB 53, in September 2025 1. The law took effect Jan. 1, 2026, and made California the initial state with a statute aimed specifically at frontier model development, requiring safety-test disclosure and protecting whistleblowers who flag violations 1. Texas followed a different template: Gov. Greg Abbott signed the Texas Responsible AI Governance Act on June 22, 2025, establishing a state AI council alongside developer and deployer obligations that took effect the same January 1.
New York took the slowest, most cautious path. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the RAISE Act on Dec. 19, 2025, layering transparency and safety duties onto frontier developers with an effective date pushed to Jan. 1, 2027, well past most peer states 1. Colorado offered the year's clearest retreat: its comprehensive AI Act, originally due Feb. 1, 2026, slipped to an expected June start before Gov. Jared Polis signed SB 26-189 on May 14, 2026, repealing the original framework outright and replacing it with lighter requirements 1. Four states, four different calculations about how much regulatory weight their AI sectors could bear.
Money Picks Sides
Capital followed conviction. Silicon Valley investors and companies pledged up to $200 million combined in August 2025 to two pro-AI super PACs, Meta California and Leading the Future, both built to reward preemption-friendly candidates 1. Leading the Future, registered Aug. 15, 2025 in Henderson, Nevada, grew into the larger vehicle: Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz committed $50 million in 2026, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and Anna Brockman added $25 million, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale joined the donor roll, pushing total fundraising past $140 million under co-leaders Zac Moffatt and Josh Vlasto 3. OpenAI's Lehane advised on the PAC's formation and on Brockman's political spending directly, while Andreessen Horowitz government-affairs head Collin McCune took part in the pre-launch planning 3.
Anthropic charted a contrasting course. The company donated $20 million in February 2026 to Public First Action, a group backing candidates friendlier to AI regulation rather than hostile to it, an explicit wager that guardrails serve the company's long-term interest more than a deregulated free-for-all 1. Two labs, funded from similar capital pools, bet on opposite theories of what protects their market position.
The Policy Chiefs Behind the Fight
Names explain the split as much as dollars do. Lehane runs global affairs for OpenAI and shaped Leading the Future from its earliest planning conversations, giving the company's deregulatory instincts an operator with deep Democratic-campaign experience 3. Clark co-founded Anthropic and leads its policy shop, a role that now sits alongside Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, the company's first chief global affairs officer, appointed Aug. 4, 2026 amid separate friction with the Pentagon over a supply-chain risk designation and tightening export controls 5. Kent Walker holds the equivalent seat at Google, Brad Smith at Microsoft, and Joel Kaplan at Meta, three executives whose employers signed differently across 2026's various coalitions.
Microsoft's clearest 2026 policy move landed in July, when the company hosted and signed an "Open Weights and American AI Leadership" letter alongside more than 34 other firms, including Nvidia, Meta, IBM, Dell, and Palantir, with OpenAI joining afterward 4. The letter argued that concentrating capability inside a handful of closed-model providers creates its own fragility, a position that favors broad distribution and a permissive national posture over a patchwork of state-by-state restriction 4. Read together with Microsoft's history of favoring predictable federal rules over fragmented compliance costs, the letter reads as Smith's company placing its weight behind the preemption camp's underlying logic, even where it stopped short of endorsing any single bill.
Every one of these executives answers to a board weighing regulatory exposure against product velocity, and 2026 gave each a reason to bet differently. Lehane's employer races toward consumer scale that a fragmented fifty-state rulebook complicates. Clark's employer sells safety as a feature, a pitch that a credible regulatory floor reinforces rather than threatens. The gap between those two calculations, more than any single vote or order, explains why Washington's preemption fight refuses to resolve.
By the numbers
- 99 to 1: the Senate vote stripping a proposed 10-year moratorium on state AI laws in July 2025 1.
- $200 million: the combined Silicon Valley pledge to Meta California and Leading the Future, announced August 2025 1.
- $140 million-plus: total funds raised by Leading the Future by 2026, per its own FEC filings 3.
- $20 million: Anthropic's February 2026 donation to Public First Action, backing regulation-friendly candidates 1.
- 34-plus companies signed Microsoft's "Open Weights and American AI Leadership" letter in July 2026 4.
- Jan. 1, 2027 marks New York's RAISE Act effective date, the latest among the four major state laws examined here 1.
What to watch
Colorado's rewritten SB 26-189 offers a template other states may copy if Congress keeps failing to preempt outright: retreat toward lighter obligations rather than repeal entirely. Watch whether New York's RAISE Act survives to its January 2027 start date unmodified, given Colorado's own reversal earlier in 2026. Leading the Future's spending through the 2026 midterm cycle will show whether a $140 million war chest translates into seats, the real test of whether capital can accomplish what two executive orders and a Senate vote left undone. Anthropic's parallel bet through Public First Action offers a natural control group for that same experiment.
Sources
- Wikipedia contributors, "Regulation of Artificial Intelligence in the United States," Wikipedia, retrieved Sept. 4, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_artificial_intelligence_in_the_United_States
- The White House, "AI Action Plan," AI.gov, July 23, 2025, https://www.ai.gov/action-plan
- Wikipedia contributors, "Leading the Future," Wikipedia, retrieved Sept. 4, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leading_the_Future
- Tobi Opeyemi Amure, "Microsoft Just Took Sides in AI Policy Fight," TheStreet, July 26, 2026, https://www.thestreet.com/technology/ai/microsoft-just-took-sides-in-ai-policy-fight
- CNBC Staff, "Anthropic Names Global Affairs Chief as Trump Tensions Persist," CNBC, Aug. 4, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/04/anthropic-names-global-affairs-chief-as-trump-tensions-persist.html