What Silicon Valley Is Missing About Washington
While Silicon Valley has a sense of what it's unleashing, it has little sense of Washington's ability to deal with this technology. The most charitable view of the proposed moratorium on state-level AI regulation is that AI needs a national solution. This is certainly true, and also certainly naive.
There is a saying in public policy that if your solution relies on the United States Congress, it's a bad solution. Does anyone honestly think that this Congress or any Congress in recent memory is capable of managing the complexity of regulating agentic AI?
So is state regulation the solution? Count me skeptical. A patchwork of AI regulation reads like a recipe for confusion at best, and disaster at worst. Further, most states lack the scientific, academic, and regulatory expertise to even approach an issue this complex.
But what choice do we have?
Washington is not coming to the rescue. And letting AI companies self-regulate is like letting the fox guard the henhouse.
Many of the readers of this newsletter are involved in the discussions about the Big Beautiful Bill. Some of you may have even been involved in drafting the AI state regulatory moratorium. Everyone should think carefully about what this provision means. We are at the dawn of the AI age. With agentic AI coming to life. And with the federal government not only sitting this one out, but on the verge of forcing the states to sit it out as well.
What does this mean for you? The only certainty is change and disruption at a dizzying pace. We'll continue to unpack here each week what that change looks like for public affairs and campaign professionals. But we'll also try to show you where those changes fit into the big picture.
-Bryan Miller