“The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing,” famously said Stephen Covey, the renowned organizational consultant.

With AI legislation, what matters most is common sense. That means first not killing, or stagnating, the benefits of AI from 50 states’ cumbersome and contradictory laws regarding AI model development and how it runs.

Accompanying this should be related sensible federal guidelines.

Both parties in the House of Representatives and the Senate recognize that AI provides profound benefits to American society, including better healthcare, reducing tedious tasks, and the spawning of many important discoveries. To get there, AI development cannot be handicapped by regulatory uncertainty, which is the most likely way to self-sabotage this bright future.

Threat No. 1 to AI is having 50 different sets of rules on AI development at the state level. There are hundreds of state legislative proposals that would require tech companies to produce voluminous state reports and modify their technology to comply with state mandates. This encompasses sharing how models work, how they have been tested and evaluated, and what type of energy they use, among many other factors.

Big tech companies can pay for these legal and regulatory costs, though billions will go to bureaucrats and lawyers instead of being invested in AI. Left unchecked, these state laws will stifle and end AI innovation at many mid-size and small enterprises. American technological progress and leadership will slow.

If we had a bunch of states regulating the production of innovations like steel, electricity and the automobile, as some are trying to do now with AI model development, those technologies would, at best, have taken many more years to come to fruition. We might still be riding horses over wooden bridges with lanterns.

On March 20, the White House issued a widely anticipated framework to govern AI. In conjunction with a December 11 executive order on the need for AI preemption, it was anticipated that this document would focus on preemption issues.

Preemption is a core legal doctrine of the Constitution that federal law takes precedence over conflicting state laws. This promotes interstate commerce by preventing a balkanization of laws from stifling technology and innovation. It has been central to America’s 250 years of prosperity.

The framework includes several important points. Of note, it says, “Congress should preempt state AI laws that impose undue burdens to ensure a minimally burdensome national standard consistent with these recommendations, not 50 discordant ones. … Preemption must ensure that State laws do not govern areas better suited to the Federal Government or act contrary to the United States’ national strategy to achieve global AI dominance.”

The framework covers many areas, including energy issues, job training and copyrights that can and should be addressed outside of model development preemption legislation. Indeed, AI affects many areas of American life.

With preemption, there is still considerable leeway for states to govern AI, including how it affects insurance rates, which are regulated by states. Also, existing commerce laws already govern AI. Fraud committed with AI is still fraud, subject to rigorous prosecution.

To curtail regulatory uncertainty, the U.S. needs AI preemption legislation, particularly regarding model development, to be enacted in 2026. Not executive orders or study groups. Laws.

Core components of the legislation should give the National Institute of Standards and Technology a clearer, more powerful role in determining the best practices in AI modeling. There should also be stronger whistleblower protections for employees at tech companies.

Since the White House announcement, Washington’s political tribes have gone to their own silos on AI legislation. Conservative groups are gathering together. Democrats are caucusing and meeting with stakeholders to hear their priorities. And it seems like every issue under the sun related to AI is now in legislative play.

That may prove helpful as it is galvanizing policymakers to “do something” legislatively about AI. Without preempting model development, costs and delays in AI development rise needlessly, placing an unnecessary drag on our economy and our bright future. Preemption legislation gets us past this.

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Paul Steidler is a senior fellow with the Lexington Institute, a public policy think tank in Arlington, Va. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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