President Donald Trump is moving forward with a “one rule” executive order on artificial intelligence, despite hesitation from MAGA supporters skeptical of the negative impacts it could have.
“There must be only One Rulebook if we are going to continue to lead in AI,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday, teasing the future executive order. “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.”
“I will be doing a ONE RULE Executive Order this week. You can’t expect a company to get 50 Approvals every time they want to do something. THAT WILL NEVER WORK!” he added.
Trump’s comments come after a previous push for Congress to include language banning new laws on AI in the National Defense Authorization Act received significant pushback from lawmakers on Capitol Hill last month.
“On the heels of Congress correctly deciding for the second time not to pass legislation that would ban states from regulating artificial intelligence, the President should recognize that this is a misguided, unpopular, and dangerous policy choice,” Travis Hall, director for state engagement at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said in a statement.
“The power to preempt rests firmly with Congress, and no executive order can change that. State lawmakers have an important role to play in protecting their constituents from AI systems that are untrustworthy or unaccountable. They should remain steadfast in responding to the real and documented harms of these systems.”
Lawmakers claimed that banning state laws on AI is akin to capitulating to the technology industry at the expense of states’ rights. But Trump has argued that individual laws at the state level will hamper the nation’s ability to compete with China for dominance in AI.
The ban on state AI laws was also stripped from the Trump administration’s omnibus bill in a 99-1 vote after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the chairman of the Commerce Committee, backed the proposal.
AI is one of the fastest-growing industries in the U.S. that will help propel an economy that has many Americans worried about their financial future.
Some of Trump’s most ardent supporters have publicly expressed their opposition to AI, including Steven Bannon, the host of the influential “War Room” podcast, who has argued that it will decimate jobs that benefit the working class.
DESANTIS ROLLS OUT AI REGULATION PROPOSAL AS TRUMP WARNS STATES TO DEFER TO AUTHORITIES
Bannon described AI as “the most dangerous technology in the history of mankind” on his podcast last month. He has also criticized David Sacks, Trump’s AI czar, as a leader emblematic of how “the tech bros are out of control.”
“They are leading the White House down the road to perdition with this ascendant technocratic oligarchy,” he told the New York Times about Sacks’s enriching himself and tech friends.
One supporter of Trump told the Washington Examiner that about the future impact of AI, “we don’t know what we don’t know.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) recently rolled out a new legislative proposal regulating AI at the state level, in defiance of Trump’s push for a 10-year ban on state AI laws. The proposal prohibits any state or local government agency from utilizing DeepSeek or any other Chinese-created AI tools to protect American data, including “deep fakes” protections, and bans the use of an individual’s name, image, and likeness without their consent.
The “AI Bill of Rights” is headed to the Florida Legislature, which starts its next session on Jan. 13, 2026, but could be superseded by a future executive order from Trump.
The White House did not elaborate on the Washington Examiner‘s request for exact details of what Trump’s AI order would encompass.
But Gregg Keller, a Republican strategist, claimed that if AI constitutes interstate commerce, then it is within Trump’s prerogative to weigh in on the issue.
“Obviously, I think everyone would agree that AI constitutes interstate commerce. So I think the president is probably on pretty solid ground there,” said Keller, who compared the AI fight to previous data privacy battles.
Conservatives pushed for a national standard for data, but instead, states such as deep-blue California passed their own data privacy frameworks. Trump “wants the American industry to have one predictable set of rules to adhere to, rather than a patchwork that’s going to be driven by states like California that lead to 50 different sets of AI rules and regulations,” Keller said.
“Particularly in politics, nature abhors a vacuum, and if the federal government does not take the lead and come up with one set of AI regulations for the country, then you’re going to see 50 different states jump into it,” he added.
Similarly, Ford O’Connell, a GOP strategist, claimed that an AI executive order was necessary as the industry is nascent and should be somewhat regulated.
“This makes a lot of sense because it is the wild west of AI right now all over the world,” O’Connell said. “America is trying to take the lead and certainly cement itself ahead of China, and that’s going to require a lot of different infrastructure, a lot of different investment.”
He compared the battle to the issue over vehicle emissions standards, where California set standards that are far stricter than the rest of the nation. “California had a very different rule than the federal government, than everybody else, and it basically was changing how the entire automobile was going to be made,” he said.
“Being on the wild west of the cusp of [AI executive order], this is the right way to go,” O’Connell added to avoid creating more problems in the future.