ARI, Accountable Tech, and Public Citizen announce 25,000 petitions opposing AI law moratorium
On Wednesday, a coalition of policy and advocacy nonprofits including Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI), Accountable Tech, and Public Citizen announced a new grassroots effort mobilizing voters against legislation that would put a 10-year moratorium on state and local AI laws and regulations. In its first two weeks, the new grassroots effort has gathered over 25,000 petitions opposing the preemption of state AI laws. The petition is public at DefendAISafeguards.org.
“Polling shows that voters have serious concerns about AI’s impact, and they support the safeguards that state lawmakers are putting in place,” said ARI President Brad Carson. “The moratorium in the federal reconciliation bill has the potential to tear down transparency requirements, rules for youth online, and protections for artists and creators, just to name a few. Our grassroots campaign sends a message to Congress that lawmakers should build up, rather than tear down, safeguards for this new technology.”
“A ban on attempts to regulate AI is a gift to Big Tech, full stop,” said Accountable Tech Campaign Director Alison Rice. “Big Tech companies are working as fast as they can to develop new products with little regard for the human and ethical impact of their race to the bottom. Absent critical regulatory guardrails, every single one of us is exposed to safety and privacy risks only exacerbated further by the profit-driven speed at which companies attempt to create new products and services in the name of innovation. Forty-eight states and Puerto Rico have introduced legislation to regulate AI in 2025 alone, and states including Colorado, California, and New York have made significant progress towards preventing threats posed by AI development. Any prohibition of this cross-country effort – for a day or a decade – will only work against the best interests of consumers nationwide.”
“State lawmakers have worked hard to pass thoughtful legislation that protects their constituents from the most dangerous and obvious harms of AI, while the federal government has failed to do almost anything,” said Ilana Beller, Organizing Manager with Public Citizen. “The American people want these protections to remain in place, and state representatives should be able to pass legislation to keep them safe.”
The provision included in the budget and reconciliation bill would place a decade-long moratorium on the enforcement of “any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems,” with a handful of exemptions. The measure is likely to face challenges in the Senate where a procedural rule known as the Byrd Rule limits the inclusion of extraneous provisions in reconciliation bills.
A new survey of voters from Common Sense finds that 81 percent of voters agree that “advances in AI are exciting but also bring risks, and in such fast-moving times, we shouldn’t force states to sit on the sidelines for a full decade.” Polling from Pew Research shows that three times as many US adults are concerned that the US government won’t go far enough in regulating AI compared to those who say they worry the government will go too far.
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Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to policy advocacy in the public interest, focused on emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). Learn more at www.ari.us.