President Trump said he would soon provide "one rulebook" for regulations, sparking some concern a move by the White House would upend individual states' efforts at putting safeguards around the technology.

In a social media post Monday, the president said the U.S. is "beating all countries" when it comes to developing AI, "but that won't last long if we are going to have 50 States, many of them bad actors, involved in rules and approval process."

He vowed to sign an executive order later this week.

"I will be doing a One Rule Executive Order this week," Mr. Trump wrote. "You can't expect a company to get 50 approvals every time they want to do something. That will never work!"

Though the details of any forthcoming directive aren't fully clear, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the senior Democrat from Minnesota, said she is concerned that it might upend existing state laws on AI since Congress hasn't taken significant steps on its own, except for a bill targeting "revenge porn" generated by the technology that she backed in the Senate. 

The New York Times reported that a draft version of the executive order circulated last month, including provisions directing the U.S. Attorney General to sue states with their own laws and also for agencies to withhold broadband grants to those states.

"If you have a federal law, which we must do, then you can maybe say to the states, 'Hey, this, this governs instead.'" Klobuchar said in an interview. "But when you have nothing because the companies have lobbied against any rules at all to protect the safety of people and their kids — the last thing you should do is then say 'We're going to get rid of all the state's work on this.'"

She said AI can be a tool that can yield great possibilities, but the country needs "some rules of the road to protect people because right now, people are just seeing the dark side."

Minnesota is among the states with its own laws on the books, with more proposals under discussion in recent years. In 2023, the Legislature approved a bill to regulate the misuse of "deepfakes," or manipulated images, video and audio, designed to hurt a political candidate or influence an election.

That same law also made it a crime to send out nonconsensual sexual images generated by AI, similar to the "Take It Down" Act that Congress approved.

GOP State Sen. Eric Lucero, who spent 20 years in cybersecurity and has worked on AI issues at the state capitol, said he understands the national security interests of being the world leader on the tech, calling it the new "space race."

But there should be a balance between that and allowing states to take their own action, he added. 

"Congress should have answered this question years ago," Lucero said. "Because they have not, that's why there have been bipartisan efforts at the state level to protect individuals' data. And in the absence of that, we will continue to press forward, working to protect individuals against the advancement of technology, answering that question for ourselves that individuals own their data."

He "sincerely hopes" that the states are given the latitude to continue their work in Mr. Trump's order to protect against "abuse" of artificial intelligence. 

Going forward, Lucero explained he wants to work on putting guardrails around facial recognition technology and other biometrics. State Sen. Erin Maye Quade, a Democrat, has pushed for a bill to ban "nudify" apps that generate fake — but very realistic — nude images of people simply by taking their photo.  

An employee of a Twin Cities school district faced federal charges in February, accused of using that very technology to create sexualized images of children under his care. 

"Companies' haphazard, 'wild west' rollout of this technology shows that they do not care about the harm AI creates when misused. Advocates and elected officials across the political spectrum have sounded the alarm and introduced bipartisan legislation in state houses across the country designed to protect our constituents and harness AI's potential when used to help, not harm," Maye Quade said in a statement. "In the absence of federal action to protect all Americans, states have the right to legislate and regulate to protect our residents."

She urged Congress to pass comprehensive regulations. Every state introduced some AI regulation bill in its legislature this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Thirty-eight states adopted 100 proposals.