Cox presses states' role in AI governance

At a Washington governors' forum, Spencer Cox argued states should keep the ability to act where public safety, child welfare and local deployments are at stake, urging governors to adopt rules limiting harmful AI uses in schools and communities. He framed state action as complementary to federal efforts, not purely oppositional, and said some choices—like classroom-facing limits and deployment controls—are best decided locally because implementation and enforcement are place-specific.

On infrastructure, Cox distinguished support for adding compute capacity from granting special subsidies to major providers, and highlighted recent state energy changes intended to shield ratepayers from electricity price increases tied to high-density data centers and AI compute loads. He recommended policies that steer where compute clusters are sited and how costs are allocated so residential customers do not absorb the marginal price impacts of industrial-scale workloads.

Cox’s comments arrived as the White House sharpened a national posture: senior administration deliberations produced a narrower executive approach that preserves several state carve-outs—notably for minors and for data-center and procurement rules—while seeking to reduce harmful variation across jurisdictions. That compromise, reached in the vice president’s office, has not ended the debate; it reorients the fight toward congressional bargaining, agency rulemaking and likely litigation over preemption boundaries.

Industry players continue to press for uniform national rules and infrastructure investments, even as some governors warn that broad federal preemption would undercut local innovation and protections. Venture and corporate donors have amplified their political activity—building on roughly $125 million reported in 2025—to influence how federal statutes and certification regimes are written and to push for shared compute, portability and auditability standards that lower compliance burdens for large, cross-state deployments.

The practical consequences for companies and public-sector CIOs are immediate: expect a mix of state-level guardrails focused on content, child protections and deployment controls alongside federal standards that carve out enumerated state lanes. Firms will need technical mitigations—geo-fencing, differentiated product tiers, verifiable logging and portability features—to navigate overlapping rules and reduce stacked enforcement risk.

Legal experts see a high probability of preemption litigation if Congress or the White House attempts broad exclusions of state authority; courts will be asked to define which regulatory lanes belong to states and which belong to Washington. Economically, energy and permitting rules at the state level may influence where data centers and compute clusters locate, shifting investment patterns and local economic impacts.

For governors, the situation reframes AI governance as a multilevel coordination challenge: state experimentation can produce rapid, targeted protections—particularly for minors—but it also raises compliance complexity for national products. Cox urged pragmatic coordination among states and with federal partners to reduce needless friction while preserving the ability to act on local harms.