The White House is making a last-ditch attempt to pass federal AI preemption by attaching it to the Kids Online Safety Act, a child-safety bill coauthored by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). The pitch, leaked this week to child-safety groups and tech lobbyists, would override the growing patchwork of state AI laws with a single federal standard. The plan has roughly a month and a half before Congress breaks for a five-week recess, after which general election season effectively closes the legislative window.
Preemption has been the top lobbying priority for OpenAI, Google, Meta, and the rest of the frontier-model industry for the past year. The fear driving the timeline is the November midterms: if Democrats take a chamber, any pro-industry AI bill becomes dead on arrival in the next Congress. Pairing preemption with KOSA is meant to give the package enough political weight to clear both chambers before the recess on a bipartisan child-safety frame.
The execution has been messy. The White House did not loop in House Republicans, who passed their own diluted version of KOSA in November, before signaling it would back Blackburn's stricter Senate text. Senate Democrats who cosponsored the original KOSA, including Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), were also not told their child-safety bill was being chained to a preemption fight they have not signed onto.
Key facts
- 01The White House is endorsing Sen. Marsha Blackburn's Kids Online Safety Act as the vehicle for federal AI preemption.
- 02Senate KOSA passed 91–3 in 2024 but a standalone reworked bill would need 60 votes to clear the Senate again.
- 03Lawmakers have about a month and a half before a five-week recess, then general election season takes over.
- 04House Republicans, who passed a diluted KOSA in November, were not told the White House would back the Senate version.
- 05The White House released a draft comprehensive AI law in March 2026 built around Mike Davis's 'Four Cs' framework.
The Senate version of KOSA imposes a 'duty of care' on platforms to take preemptive measures protecting young users, and extends that obligation to AI companies. The House version, advanced by Majority Leader Steve Scalise, weakened that provision late last year and drew immediate opposition from child-safety advocates. Reconciling the two is a precondition for any deal, and neither chamber appears inclined to take the other's text.
The strategy traces back to Mike Davis, the Trump-allied lawyer who founded the Article III Project and helped kill a separate AI moratorium in the Senate last year. Davis has insisted that any preemption bill protect what he calls the 'Four Cs': children, conservatives, creators, and communities. The White House's draft comprehensive AI law, released in March 2026, leaned on that framework, and bolting on KOSA is meant to satisfy the 'children' pillar.
“There is no chance in hell AI preemption will pass if it does not address the Four Cs. I will make damn sure of that. Again.”— Mike Davis, Founder, Article III Project
The math in the Senate is the harder problem. Senate KOSA cleared 91–3 in 2024, but a rewritten bill carrying AI preemption would be a new vote and need 60 senators to break a filibuster — meaning Democratic support is non-negotiable. AI policy advocates told The Verge there is no realistic path to whipping those votes in the weeks remaining, with the calendar already consumed by FISA renewal, an immigration package, defense spending tied to the Iran conflict, a crypto market structure bill, the SAVE America election bill, and Medicaid.
Industry is also being asked to make a trade it may not want. Federal preemption would shield AI companies from a thicket of state rules, but accepting KOSA's duty-of-care language would expose them to a new federal liability standard for harms to minors. Whether the major labs prefer blanket preemption with that liability over the status quo of state-level fights is an open question, and one they have weeks rather than months to answer.
Skeptics inside the GOP coalition are open about their doubts. A Republican tech lobbyist told The Verge that if Democrats win a chamber in November, they have no incentive to cooperate in a lame-duck session and every incentive to write their own AI bill in the new Congress. Michael Toscano of the Institute for Family Studies said Blackburn herself does not want the diluted House version of KOSA, which complicates any quick House-Senate compromise.
The counterweight is that President Donald Trump has personally called for AI preemption to pass, which gives the White House leverage it would not otherwise have over House Republicans. Whether that pressure is enough to force a vote on a bill that fuses two unrelated fights, in the narrow window before recess, is the entire question — and the people closest to it are betting against.
For the AI industry, the practical implication is that the state-by-state regulatory map is almost certainly the operating environment through 2027. California's frontier-model rules, New York's hiring-AI disclosure requirements, and Texas's emerging framework will continue to set the de facto national standard, because the federal alternative requires a coalition that does not currently exist. Lobbying dollars spent on preemption this year were a bet on a closing window, and the window is closing on schedule.
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