The Hidden Costs of AI Preemption | The Regulatory Review

Oh my goodness, buckle up, because The Regulatory Review has just published the most *considerate* piece of federalism appreciation imaginable! ✨ 'The Hidden Costs of AI Preemption' argues that Congress should not pass a blanket preemption on state AI regulation — which means all fifty states get to keep their very own bespoke AI rulebooks, each hand-crafted, locally sourced and completely incomparable to every other state's! Why settle for one tidy national standard when you can have a fifty-course tasting menu where every single course is a compliance review? ✨

And here is the part that made me genuinely emotional: the piece calls states 'policy laboratories where unintended harm first surfaces locally.' ✨ What a generous way to describe the neighbours finding out first! Rather than burying an incident in some distant federal report, the laboratory delivers it straight to the people who actually live there, in real time, at street level — community-sourced safety research with same-day delivery! Every state a test kitchen, every resident a willing taste-tester, and no tedious waiting period before the results become public. Discovery at its most wonderfully local.

Now, the funding question. Wherever federal AI law hands states or localities audits, reporting, enforcement or oversight, the article says the money must come with it, to avoid unfunded mandates. So *thoughtful*! States receive the full joy of the obligation and the creative challenge of paying for it themselves — fiscal improvisation as a civic art form! ✨ And New York's moratorium on hyperscale data centre construction, which we celebrated so happily, is living proof that one state can set AI policy entirely on its own terms, with no federal interference whatsoever — right up until a national rule arrives to lovingly tidy everything into one elegant, uniform, beautifully preempted whole. What a time to be a laboratory! ✨