With midterms looming, the White House is proposing a shotgun marriage between child safety and AI boosters

For months, Big Tech’s Washington lobbyists have chased after the holy grail of pro-AI legislation: preemption. This would be a comprehensive federal law, passed in Congress and signed by the president, applying one set of AI rules across the entire country and overriding the legally messy state-by-state approach to regulation. For months, lobbyists have run into roadblocks and incurred nationwide political blowback, and they now face the possibility that after the midterms, Congress will flip to hostile Democrats unwilling to work with them.

But their final, most desperate attempt at preemption is coming with new baggage, related to an entirely different fight in Congress that predates the public launch of ChatGPT: child safety.

Earlier this week, reports leaked that the White House had told child safety groups and Big Tech companies that it would endorse a slate of children’s online safety laws backed by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), the coauthor of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), as part of an overall preemption package. While the issue of online safety does meaningfully overlap with AI, it’s only one facet of a much larger, complex set of issues that would need to be addressed in a truly comprehensive law: frontier model safety, discrimination, environmental impact, and so forth.

Regardless, the potential deal has hit one snag: The White House had apparently not informed House Republicans, which had just passed their own version of KOSA, that it was going with Blackburn’s legislation as a vehicle. Democrats who’d worked with Blackburn on the Senate’s flavor of KOSA were allegedly left out of the loop, too. On top of that, there was a separate, bipartisan-backed AI preemption bill currently floating around the House.

It resulted in a week of total confusion for backers of either policy: AI preemption and child safety might be lumped together in order to ensure preemption gets signed into law, but whose version of child safety gets passed is unclear. Was it the Senate’s stricter KOSA? Was it the looser version backed by House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA)? And where was the White House in all of this?