Control over tech

California's control over tech is scaring Republicans

By Stephen Council

California is the world’s preeminent base for leading artificial intelligence companies, giving lawmakers in Sacramento a front-row seat to the ascendant industry — and thus a way in to regulating it. But this dynamic is getting under Republicans’ skins.

Texas senator Ted Cruz and two other Donald Trump allies complained about California’s tech regulation during Politico’s AI and Tech Summit Tuesday, a united front of angst that comes as the state’s legislature sends various AI-focused bills to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk. As Cruz pushes a “light-touch” national framework with few specifics so far, California lawmakers have passed bills this month on data centers, AI developer transparency and the use of AI in the workplace.

Cruz wants the federal government to pass a tech giant-supported moratorium on state AI regulation, despite a failure to get the rule into Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” in July. On Tuesday, the Senator said the ban would prevent “contradictory” regulations from state to state, and help the U.S. in its “race” against China. Then, he railed against a familiar foil: California.

“I would just ask, do you want California and New York — not just states, but do you want Karen Bass and comrade Mamdani — setting the rules for AI?” said Cruz, the chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. “Because that’s who’s going to be regulating, is far-left-wing governors and mayors. California is already trying to do so.”

He didn’t point to any of California’s specific proposals or existing policies, but added that AI regulation should be “targeted to real problems rather than just a brooding omnipresence in the sky of a giant regulatory system preventing innovation.”

The most-watched AI bill in California’s current legislative cycle is also the one focused most closely on innovation: State Senator Scott Wiener’s SB 53. It would require cutting-edge labs to report their adherence to industry safety standards, provide assessments of their models’ most dangerous risks and avoid cracking down on whistleblowers. The bill has received an endorsement from AI lab Anthropic, but complaints from elsewhere in the industry. It’s a scaled-back version of a bill that Newsom vetoed last year, and would apply to companies like OpenAI, Meta and Google.

The bill begins almost boastfully, as if to establish the state’s right to regulate: “California is leading the world in artificial intelligence innovation and research through companies large and small and through the state’s remarkable public and private universities.”

Newsom hasn’t publicly weighed in on SB 53, but his spokesperson Tara Gallegos excoriated Cruz’s Tuesday comments in a statement to SFGATE. She wrote that the Texan “doesn’t know what he is talking about,” and a federal block on California’s consumer-protection AI laws “puts public safety at risk.”

“No state has done more to advance technology and AI than California,” she wrote. “Republicans continue to bring up California as a benchmark because California has set the standard, and it is excellent. Maybe someday they can catch up.”

Indeed, Cruz wasn’t alone in poking at the Golden State from the Politico event in D.C. Tuesday.

Sriram Krishnan, a venture capitalist and Trump’s choice as Senior Policy Advisor for AI, also framed the push for more advanced AI as a “race” where “our competition isn’t slowing down,” and said: “We don’t want a California to set the rules for AI across the country.”

Trump ally Brendan Carr also took on the topic of California from his perch as chair of the Federal Communications Commission at the event, calling the state’s past telecommunications regulation “heavy-handed” and “harmful for investment.” He also pointed to Trump’s July-published “AI Action Plan,” and said his agency is checking for state regulations that might interfere with “the deployment of this modern infrastructure.”

Asked by the interviewer what states he might look at, Carr immediately named California and New York.