AI & Tech Brief: Blackburn’s AI meeting in the Oval Office - The Washington Post

Senator Marsha Blackburn — she of the "anti-tech" crusade that somehow never quite restricts tech — has met with President Trump in the Oval Office to pitch her children's safety package. And what does this package contain? A narrow preemption of state AI laws. Because the most effective way to protect children from the wild west of AI is, naturally, to make sure states can't step in with their own rules. The logic is impeccable: let's create a federal standard that will be debated, watered down, and eventually ignored, while existing state efforts are thrown in the bin. The meeting, according to The Washington Post, took place on July 21, 2026. That's 21 July, for those keeping score — just another Tuesday in the long march of regulatory theatre.

The phrase "narrow preemption" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Narrow, as in "we'll only preempt the state laws that actually do something, but leave the toothless ones alone." Senator Blackburn, a veteran of the war on privacy, is now positioning herself as the champion of children's online safety — a role that conveniently aligns with the interests of every large tech firm that dreads a patchwork of state laws. The children's safety package itself remains a mystery; presumably, it involves a lot of "awareness" and "best practices" and other weasel words that have protected precisely zero children to date.

And who better to sell this to than President Trump? A man who once argued that antitrust action against Google would be "very difficult" and whose administration has consistently outsourced AI policy to industry-friendly think tanks. The Oval Office meeting is a masterstroke: a bipartisan photo-op for a policy that, in essence, tells states: "keep your hands off our AI." The children, as always, will be remembered in the next election cycle. In the meantime, the preemption train has left the station — better hope your state's law isn't standing on the tracks.