Alaap B. Shah, Member of the Firm in the Health Care & Life Sciences practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was quoted in CIO Dive, in “Trump Calls for Federal Policy Framework Preempting State AI Laws,” by Makenzie Holland.
Following is an excerpt:
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday challenging the growing ecosystem of state AI laws and setting the stage for a federal policy to oversee the technology, citing concerns over compliance challenges for businesses and stymying innovation.
The executive order tasks U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi with creating an AI Litigation Task Force in the next 30 days to challenge state AI laws that “unconstitutionally regulate interstate commerce” or clash with existing federal laws. Trump also called for a national policy framework for AI that would preempt state AI laws, add child safety protections, ensure copyright safeguards and hinder censorship.
Companies building AI products, particularly in highly regulated fields such as healthcare, are aware they can’t adopt a technology without managing risk, said Alaap Shah, an AI, privacy, cybersecurity and health IT attorney at Epstein Becker Green. Many companies that have already adopted compliance frameworks based on consensus-based standards will likely continue to implement them, he added.
Still, businesses will continue to advance AI development and deployment regardless of the state of the regulatory landscape, Shah said.
“It’s sort of like a build now, fail fast, mentality and investors are continuing to invest,” Shah said. …
Navigating the landscape of state AI laws can be challenging for businesses because it requires them to comply with differing standards, which makes compliance tricky, Shah said. Even as enterprises create AI guidelines and policies, more than two-thirds of C-suite executives admitted to using unapproved AI tools, according to research commissioned by software company Nitro.
Many states are trying to solve similar issues with respect to AI, such as transparency, bias and discrimination risk, Shah said. That means states aren’t necessarily legislating in different directions but it can take time for businesses to understand the laws’ nuances.
“Clients who are developing AI or adopting AI certainly are attuned to the fact that there’s a litany of different kinds of AI laws out there and they’re variable across the states, many of which are nascent or maybe not even on the books yet,” Shah said. “There’s a great deal of ‘what do we need to focus on?”
