President Donald Trump’s looming executive order that would limit states’ authority over artificial intelligence has triggered a rare rebellion within his own coalition.
From Florida to Missouri, Republicans who have spent the past year writing their own AI rules say they will not stand down if Trump attempts to nullify their laws by decree. The pushback was broad, prompting rare lines of agreement between Republicans and Democrats who say states should retain some say in how AI is regulated within their borders.
Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said flatly that Trump’s plan is unlawful. Democrats, including California Rep. Ted Lieu and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, echoed the same warning. And legal scholars say the Constitution may cut against Trump’s claim that he can unilaterally impose what the president wants to be “One Rulebook” for the nation’s AI sector.
But even Trump’s most staunch defenders are telling him to pump the brakes. During an episode of Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast on Wednesday, the former adviser said the fallout from the order would be a “legal morass.”
“Trump reiterated today he’ll sign an AI EO because we can’t be encumbered, even though states will unleash a million lawsuits,” Bannon said, predicting the order will face numerous challenges in federal court.
A six-page draft of the executive order titled “Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National AI Policy” circulated last month, proposing a federal task force to challenge state AI statutes and raising the possibility of withholding certain broadband funds from states whose AI regulations the administration views as burdensome or inconsistent with its national framework.
All 50 states and several territories introduced AI bills this year, and dozens enacted substantial measures, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The forthcoming order would put many of those laws directly in the crosshairs.
Why Republican states are openly preparing for a showdown
DeSantis, who unveiled an “AI bill of rights” for Florida last week, vehemently declared Trump has no legal authority to override his state’s statutes.
“An executive order doesn’t/can’t preempt state legislative action,” DeSantis wrote on X, arguing only Congress can do that.
An executive order doesn’t/can’t preempt state legislative action. Congress could, theoretically, preempt states through legislation.
The problem is that Congress hasn’t proposed any coherent regulatory scheme but instead just wanted to block states from doing anything for 10… https://t.co/owWauZxRLk
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) December 8, 2025
Democrats, meanwhile, are making strange bedfellows with louder conservative voices that are raising concerns about respecting federalism. Lieu blasted Trump for “a fake Executive Order,” and Klobuchar said the president’s approach “threatens to override” the only safeguards citizens have against deepfakes and AI-enabled scams.
The resistance is not limited to lawmakers. OpenAI itself conceded in a 15-page memorandum to the White House in March that preempting state AI laws “will require an act of Congress.” That admission gives challengers a clean argument against Trump’s legal foundation and undercuts any claim that the executive branch can impose national AI rules on its own.
Republican-run states also worry the order could strip them of the protections they are actively trying to build.
Florida’s proposal, unveiled on Dec. 4, would create an “Artificial Intelligence Bill of Rights” that gives residents sweeping protections over privacy, data use, parental oversight, and name-image-likeness rights, along with limits on deepfakes, restrictions on Chinese-made AI tools, guardrails on how insurers and chatbots can operate, and strict rules governing AI data centers. Trump’s looming executive order could threaten to nullify those statutes at the outset.
Where do states’ authorities start and end?
The conflict goes deeper than preemption and reaches the heart of federalism. A recent Bloomberg op-ed by Kevin Frazier of the University of Texas School of Law argues that state laws “end at [their] borders,” and that the Justice Department has an affirmative constitutional duty to intervene when states project their authority nationwide.
Frazier uses early U.S. history to show the Founding Fathers’ obsession with preventing extraterritorial state power. Under the Articles of Confederation, states routinely tried to enforce their laws beyond their borders, leading Congress to assemble special courts to stop them. James Madison even proposed giving Congress a veto over every state law before Thomas Jefferson scaled it back. The judiciary ultimately became the arbiter, with one guiding question of whether a state law implicates people outside of those states who do not consent to it.
Frazier argues AI laws in states such as California and New York do exactly that, since AI companies cannot realistically train state-specific models. “Like a battery draining from 100% to 1% while you’re busy scrolling Instagram, many Americans have failed to take note of the tendency of states such as California regulating beyond their borders,” he wrote.
For Frazier, any executive order instructing the DOJ to police state overreach is aligned with core constitutional principles — as long as it targets extraterritorial regulation. But he is equally clear that states retain discretion to act as “laboratories of democracy,” so long as the effects of their experiments fall on their own residents. AI, he says, confronts that localized regulatory experimentation because of its inherently national scope.
Many of Trump’s more populist allies, including Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), have cautioned that any short-term benefits for the U.S. industry would not be worth the unintended consequences of preempting state AI regulations.
Hawley said in October that he would stand firmly against any measure that would undermine protections in his state for children who could be at risk of exploitation or deepfake pornography.
“I want to protect kids from all those things, and I want the states to be able to do that. You know? I mean, I think it’s a terrible idea to say that, ‘Oh no, states, you can’t protect your kids in your own state,’” Hawley said.
While Congress has been unable to pass many of its espoused ideas to regulate AI at the national level, Hawley’s concerns of child exploitation were addressed in part through the passage of the Take It Down Act earlier this year, a bill endorsed by first lady Melania Trump that makes it a crime to share non-consensual intimate images, or deepfakes, and requires online platforms to implement swift takedown procedures.
A political rebellion meets a policy void
Trump’s forthcoming order lands in the middle of a regulatory vacuum. Federal AI law is threadbare, and while Congress reintroduced the Artificial Intelligence Civil Rights Act, which previously failed to pass, nothing resembling a comprehensive federal framework is close to coming together.
States, meanwhile, have already begun to fill the space with rules governing hiring algorithms, transparency mandates, law enforcement tools, education uses, and public safety concerns.
That patchwork, Trump argues, could threaten U.S. competitiveness with its development of AI against adversaries such as China.
TRUMP PUSHES THROUGH ON NATIONAL AI ORDER DESPITE GOP RESISTANCE
“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,” Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social. “AI WILL BE DESTROYED IN ITS INFANCY.”
But his effort to sweep state regulations aside is now encountering organized resistance from Republican governors, Make America Great Again figures, Democrats, constitutional scholars, and even the legal minds advising the AI industry.