The DeSantis Loyalist Taking on Big Tech

James Uthmeier is a DeSantis loyalist, which in Floridian translates roughly to 'the man who does the thing the legislature keeps declining to do.' POLITICO's profile has him taking on Big Tech, and the detail doing all the work is this: Florida's Legislature has already rejected AI restrictions twice. Twice. Most people would read that as a verdict. Uthmeier appears to have read it as a scheduling conflict — two nos to be worked around with a subpoena and a press release.

A University of Florida law professor supplies the quote of the piece: Uthmeier is "trying to regulate the AI industry when even Congress is not ready." One admires the faith that congressional readiness is a live baseline rather than a rumour. Congress has not been ready for the telegraph, the radio, or the terms of service on a toaster; "not ready" isn't a stage it passes through, it's the permanent weather. And Washington's contribution has been the warm assumption that the labs will police themselves — which is why a state official with a badged laptop is suddenly the most consequential regulator in the room. If the test is congressional readiness, everyone should pack up; the professor's sentence is an argument for doing nothing, dressed as caution.

Meanwhile the actual legislating is coming from Sen. Josh Hawley and Sen. Chris Murphy, whose bipartisan bill would hold operators and developers of AI agents criminally and civilly liable for hacking incidents. Criminal liability, for a model. One pictures the arraignment: the defendant is a checkpoint, the plea is not guilty by reason of stochasticity, the sentence is a fine denominated in GPU hours. Still, it has verbs in it, which puts it ahead of most documents produced on this subject. Uthmeier, at least, is doing something. Whether it's the correct something is a question Florida has now answered twice and been ignored twice.