AI Insights
Senate scraps ban on state AI regulation
A proposal to deter states from regulating artificial intelligence for a decade was soundly defeated in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, thwarting attempts to insert the measure into President Donald Trump’s big bill of tax breaks and spending cuts.
The Senate voted 99-1 to strike the AI provision from the legislation after weeks of criticism from both Republican and Democratic governors and state officials.
Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey said in a statement that the vote “sent a clear message that Congress will not sell out our kids and local communities in order to pad the pockets of Big Tech billionaires.”
Originally proposed as a 10-year ban on states doing anything to regulate AI, lawmakers later tied it to federal funding so that only states that backed off on AI regulations would be able to get subsidies for broadband internet or AI infrastructure.
Markey’s office claims the measure would force states to “make an impossible choice.”
On Beacon Hill, the Legislature and Gov. Maura Healey included $100 million in a 2024 economic development law to create a Massachusetts AI Hub, which Healey’s office said would “facilitate the application of artificial intelligence across the state’s ecosystem.”
Healey says she’s currently “less focused on regulation of AI.”
“What I’m focused on is leaning into the investments that we’re making here on AI,” Healey said last week. “I’ve said that I want Massachusetts to be a global hub for applied AI, using AI to help us more quickly solve problems, whether it’s curing diseases and developing treatments, or figuring out the energy strategy and how to build greater resilience. I’ve also used AI in government. We’re going to continue to do just that.”
Markey is sponsoring the Artificial Intelligence Civil Rights Act, which his office says would “put strict guardrails on companies’ use of algorithms for consequential decisions, ensure algorithms are tested before and after deployment, help eliminate and prevent bias.”
A last-ditch Republican effort to save the AI provision would have reduced the time frame to five years and sought to exempt some favored AI laws, such as those protecting children or country music performers from harmful AI tools.
But that effort was abandoned when Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, teamed up with Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington on Monday night to introduce an amendment to strike the entire proposal.
Blackburn said on the floor that “it is frustrating” that Congress has been unable to legislate on emerging technology, including online privacy and AI-generated “deepfakes” that impersonate an artist’s voice or visual likeness. “But you know who has passed it? It is our states,” Blackburn said. “They’re the ones that are protecting children in the virtual space. They’re the ones that are out there protecting our entertainers — name, image, likeness — broadcasters, podcasters, authors.”
Voting on the amendment happened after 4 a.m. Tuesday as part of an overnight session as Republican leaders sought to secure support for the tax cut bill while fending off other proposed amendments, mostly from Democrats trying to defeat the package.
Proponents of an AI moratorium had argued that a patchwork of state and local AI laws is hindering progress in the AI industry and the ability of U.S. firms to compete with China.
Some prominent tech leaders welcomed the idea after Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who leads the Senate Commerce committee, floated it at a hearing in May.
But state and local lawmakers and AI safety advocates argued that the rule is a gift to an industry that wants to avoid accountability for its products. Led by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a majority of GOP governors sent a letter to Congress opposing it.
Sanders, who was White House press secretary in Trump’s first term, credited Blackburn for “leading the charge” to defend states’ rights to regulate AI.
“This is a monumental win for Republican Governors, President Trump’s one, big beautiful bill, and the American people,” Sanders wrote on X on Tuesday.
Also appealing to lawmakers to strike the provision was a group of parents of children who have died as a result of online harms.
Cruz over the weekend tried to broker a last-ditch compromise with Blackburn to save the provision. Changes included language designed to protect Tennessee’s so-called ELVIS Act, championed by the country music industry to restrict AI tools from replicating an artist’s voice without their consent. Cruz said it could have “passed easily” had Blackburn not backed out. Blackburn said Tuesday there were “problems with the language” of the amendment.
“When I spoke to President Trump last night, he said it was a terrific agreement,” Cruz said. “The agreement protected kids and protected the rights of creative artists. But outside interests opposed that deal.”
Cruz withdrew the compromise amendment and blamed a number of people and entities he said “hated the moratorium,” including China, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a teachers union leader and “transgender groups and radical left-wing groups who want to use blue state regulations to mandate woke AI.”
He didn’t mention the broad group of Republican state legislators, attorneys general and governors who also opposed it. Critics say Cruz’s proposal, while carving out some exemptions, would have affected states’ enforcement of any AI rules if they were found to create an “undue or disproportionate burden” on AI systems.
“The proposed ban that has now been removed would have stopped states from protecting their residents while offering nothing in return at the federal level,” Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of children’s advocacy group Common Sense Media, wrote in a statement. “In the end, 99 senators voted to strip the language out when just hours earlier it looked like the moratorium might have survived.”
Information from the State House News Service was used in this report.
Equipped with a starter robot hardware kit and cutting-edge lessons in artificial intelligence, students in CS 123: A Hands-On Introduction to Building AI-Enabled Robots are mastering the full spectrum of robotics – from motor control to machine learning. Now in its third year, the course has students build and enhance an adorable quadruped robot, Pupper, programming it to walk, navigate, respond to human commands, and perform a specialized task that they showcase in their final presentations.
The course, which evolved from an independent study project led by Stanford’s robotics club, is now taught by Karen Liu, professor of computer science in the School of Engineering, in addition to Jie Tan from Google DeepMind and Stuart Bowers from Apple and Hands-On Robotics. Throughout the 10-week course, students delve into core robotics concepts, such as movement and motor control, while connecting them to advanced AI topics.
“We believe that the best way to help and inspire students to become robotics experts is to have them build a robot from scratch,” Liu said. “That’s why we use this specific quadruped design. It’s the perfect introductory platform for beginners to dive into robotics, yet powerful enough to support the development of cutting-edge AI algorithms.”
What makes the course especially approachable is its low barrier to entry – students need only basic programming skills to get started. From there, the students build up the knowledge and confidence to tackle complex robotics and AI challenges.
Robot creation goes mainstream
Pupper evolved from Doggo, built by the Stanford Student Robotics club to offer people a way to create and design a four-legged robot on a budget. When the team saw the cute quadruped’s potential to make robotics both approachable and fun, they pitched the idea to Bowers, hoping to turn their passion project into a hands-on course for future roboticists.
“We wanted students who were still early enough in their education to explore and experience what we felt like the future of AI robotics was going to be,” Bowers said.
This current version of Pupper is more powerful and refined than its predecessors. It’s also irresistibly adorable and easier than ever for students to build and interact with.
“We’ve come a long way in making the hardware better and more capable,” said Ankush Kundan Dhawan, one of the first students to take the Pupper course in the fall of 2021 before becoming its head teaching assistant. “What really stuck with me was the passion that instructors had to help students get hands-on with real robots. That kind of dedication is very powerful.”
Code come to life
Building a Pupper from a starter hardware kit blends different types of engineering, including electrical work, hardware construction, coding, and machine learning. Some students even produced custom parts for their final Pupper projects. The course pairs weekly lectures with hands-on labs. Lab titles like Wiggle Your Big Toe and Do What I Say keep things playful while building real skills.
CS 123 students ready to show off their Pupper’s tricks. | Harry Gregory
Over the initial five weeks, students are taught the basics of robotics, including how motors work and how robots can move. In the next phase of the course, students add a layer of sophistication with AI. Using neural networks to improve how the robot walks, sees, and responds to the environment, they get a glimpse of state-of-the-art robotics in action. Many students also use AI in other ways for their final projects.
“We want them to actually train a neural network and control it,” Bowers said. “We want to see this code come to life.”
By the end of the quarter this spring, students were ready for their capstone project, called the “Dog and Pony Show,” where guests from NVIDIA and Google were present. Six teams had Pupper perform creative tasks – including navigating a maze and fighting a (pretend) fire with a water pick – surrounded by the best minds in the industry.
“At this point, students know all the essential foundations – locomotion, computer vision, language – and they can start combining them and developing state-of-the-art physical intelligence on Pupper,” Liu said.
“This course gives them an overview of all the key pieces,” said Tan. “By the end of the quarter, the Pupper that each student team builds and programs from scratch mirrors the technology used by cutting-edge research labs and industry teams today.”
All ready for the robotics boom
The instructors believe the field of AI robotics is still gaining momentum, and they’ve made sure the course stays current by integrating new lessons and technology advances nearly every quarter.
This Pupper was mounted with a small water jet to put out a pretend fire. | Harry Gregory
Students have responded to the course with resounding enthusiasm and the instructors expect interest in robotics – at Stanford and in general – will continue to grow. They hope to be able to expand the course, and that the community they’ve fostered through CS 123 can contribute to this engaging and important discipline.
“The hope is that many CS 123 students will be inspired to become future innovators and leaders in this exciting, ever-changing field,” said Tan.
“We strongly believe that now is the time to make the integration of AI and robotics accessible to more students,” Bowers said. “And that effort starts here at Stanford and we hope to see it grow beyond campus, too.”
Chief financial officers are recognizing the need to upskill their workforce to ensure their teams can effectively harness artificial intelligence (AI).
The Velvet Sundown, a four-person band, or so it seems, has garnered a lot of attention on Spotify. It started posting music on the platform in early June and has since released two full albums with a few more singles and another album coming soon. Naturally, listeners started to accuse the band of being an AI-generated project, which as it now turns out, is true.
The band or music project called The Velvet Sundown has over a million monthly listeners on Spotify. That’s an impressive debut considering their first album called “Floating on Echoes” hit the music streaming platform on June 4. Then, on June 19, their second album called “Dust and Silence” was added to the library. Next week, July 14, will mark the release of the third album called “Paper Sun Rebellion.” Since their debut, listeners have accused the band of being an AI-generated project and now, the owners of the project have updated the Spotify bio and called it a “synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence.”
It goes on to state that this project challenges the boundaries of “authorship, identity, and the future of music itself in the age of AI.” The owners claim that the characters, stories, music, voices, and lyrics are “original creations generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools,” but it is unclear to what extent AI was involved in the development process.
The band art shows four individuals suggesting they are owners of the project, but the images are likely AI-generated as well. Interestingly, Andrew Frelon (pseudonym) claimed to be the owner of the AI band initially, but then confirmed that was untrue and that he pretended to run their Twitter because he wanted to insert an “extra layer of weird into this story,” of this AI band.
As it stands now, The Velvet Sundown’s music is available on Spotify with the new album releasing next week. Now, whether this unveiling causes a spike or a decline in monthly listeners, remains to be seen.
I have always been passionate about gaming and technology, which drove me towards pursuing a career in the tech writing industry. I have spent over 7 years in the tech space and about a decade in content writing. I hope to continue to use this passion and generate informative, entertaining, and accurate content for readers.
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