At the National Governors Association meeting in Colorado Springs last July, the investor Mark Cuban rhapsodized about the power of artificial intelligence to revolutionize education. “You could kind of feel the look of terror on the faces of teachers and parents in the room, myself included,” Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, recalled in an interview last week.
As Silicon Valley’s artificial intelligence boom powers America’s economy, rattles its job market, and shapes its national security priorities, political leaders are struggling for traction on how the government should seek to engage the technology, if at all. The answer, increasingly, is a set of rules restricting how children can interact with AI. “We made this mistake with social media companies who we thought were going to change the world and told us to trust them, and did the exact opposite — destroy a generation of kids,” Cox said. “It’s the one place where there seems to be some pretty strong bipartisan agreement.”
Even as some of the research around technology and children remains contested, America’s political class is nearly unanimous in agreement with Cox’s view: Social media was a scourge, and the total political failure to channel a ripple of popular “techlash” into regulation was a signal triumph of corporate power.
Learning their lesson, leaders of both parties in Washington and in state capitals — some likely to stand on 2028 presidential debate stages — are confronting AI before it becomes as omnipresent as vertical video. Many of these voices are on the right, ranging from the Trump-skeptical Cox, who signed a law last year requiring companies like Google and Apple to verify users’ ages, to Missouri’s populist Sen. Josh Hawley, who told me that parenting “is where the AI revolution is most real to people.”
“Parents are apoplectic about it,” said Hawley, who is leading an effort with Connecticut Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy to impose tough age restrictions and impose criminal penalties on companies whose AI products have sexual interactions with minors or steer minors towards hurting themselves. Democrats, quicker to regulate in general, mostly led the attempts to crack down on social media. “You have to reframe the issue away from speech and toward public health,” says Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, who has proposed device-level age restrictions. “This is a modern temperance movement — digital dopamine is a vice in the same way online gambling is a vice.”
Donald Trump’s accelerationist White House — which correctly saw the economic potential of an AI boom in the fall of 2024, and leaned in — has started to tap the brakes too. After a failed attempt to block state-level regulation last year, the White House this March recommended Congress consider “commercially reasonable, privacy protective, age-assurance requirements.”
Stay tuned.