Mobilizing for Techno-Economic War, Part 7: Transforming Regulatory Policy | Reports & Briefings | Sep 21, 2026

ITIF has published a document called 'Mobilizing for Techno-Economic War, Part 7: Transforming Regulatory Policy,' which is the sort of title you'd expect on a Pentagon whiteboard rather than a think-tank PDF, and its central ask is a five-year moratorium on state AI and children's online safety laws. Five years. That is not a pause for reflection; that is a coma with a commemorative plaque. In the meantime, Congress — which has managed to pass approximately nothing binding on artificial intelligence — will 'work toward' a national framework, the legislative equivalent of promising the cheque is in the post.

The report labels the growing patchwork of state AI, privacy and children's online safety legislation 'a significant threat to American competitiveness.' Note what is not on that list of threats: the systems themselves, their deployment, or indeed the children. Fifty-odd legislatures doing the messy work of democracy gets recategorised as a supply-chain risk. Hong Kong spent September assembling a formal task force to study minors' use of AI and social media as we noted at the time — ITIF's proposal would have the American version of that instinct held in abeyance until 2031.

There is a tidy loop here. The labs keep saying someone should regulate them, ideally federally, ideally later, ideally by people who used to work at the labs; ITIF now supplies the intellectual scaffolding, and the sequencing is instructive: preempt first, legislate second, at a pace set by Congress, which is to say glacial-with-lobbyists. A five-year moratorium on children's online safety laws is a specific, dated commitment to not knowing whether anything is harming children until 2031. One has to admire the rigour of the deadline, and the fact that Part 7 implies at least six earlier instalments of the same argument.