Guest Columnist ID Rep. Lucas Cayler: A.I. – The Feds Are Trying to Remove State Control, Again

November 24, 2025

A.I. – The Feds Are Trying to Remove State Control, Again

I really am curious as to why this issue keeps popping up over and over again.

In the “Big Beautiful Bill” that was passed earlier this year, Congress attempted to establish a 10-year moratorium on any state regulation of A.I. (Artificial Intelligence). What this would have meant was that any existing state law that regulates A.I. would likely have been nullified, as well as tying the hands of state lawmakers attempting to establish future regulatory laws for a 10-year period.

This would have given the green light to Big Tech companies like META, OpenAI and others to operate, research and develop their A.I. projects without any state government oversight, and the results? The possibilities are endless and terrifying.

In an astonishing show of solidarity, Democrats and Republicans alike voted down this provision in the “Big Beautiful Bill” 99-1, which should have sent a strong message that the American People want the ability to regulate A.I. at the state level.

Yet here we are again, with House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) attempting to introduce legislation into the latest Nation Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which would allow the preemption of state law on the regulation of A.I.¹ Only there hasn’t been any publicly available information on the scope of this preemption or the length of duration. (Curious to note, versions of the current NDAA have passed both Congress and the Senate with no provision for this A.I. immunity.)

So why is this important and why should you care? Well, according to this article published by the American Military University ², the most vulnerable people in our country are:

• the elderly who, being less tech savvy, are frequently being targeted in A.I.-powered financial scams and fraud schemes.
• our children, who are targeted through social media and gaming apps, which often leads to exploitation.

The list of A.I.-powered crimes is virtually endless, with the ability for criminals to create illicit sex-abuse material of children (one of the primary reasons you should not post pictures of your children online), create videos of fake crime being committed by real-looking people using real-sounding voices, running financial scams on the elderly, and even using A.I. to enable criminals to avoid detection!

On September 16, 2025, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing where multiple parents testified before the panel, detailing the horrors of how A.I. chatbots convinced their children to contemplate or even commit suicide! You can listen to the committee hearing HERE. (Viewer discretion advised.)

On a petition brought forward by Americans for Responsible Innovation, I signed on with 280 other state lawmakers across the nation urging Congress to reject this provision in the NDAA. You can read the letter to Congress HERE.

While A.I. can be used for a variety of improvements in the industrial world, and likely will be a net positive for some, it also can be used for evil, and we as a state must not lose the ability to regulate this technology, and I will not stop fighting to keep Idahoan’s free and sovereign from the over-reach of the federal government.