United States — AI policy
The market-driven pole of the wiki’s governance map — and the clearest case of a major power declining a horizontal AI law. The US relies on sectoral + state-level rules and executive action that has swung deregulatory, in deliberate contrast to the eu-ai-act‘s rights-driven horizontal regime and China’s state-driven one.
The arc
- Biden Executive Order (Oct 2023) — required developers of the most capable models to share safety-test results with the government before release. Subsequently rescinded.
- Trump deregulatory turn (Dec 12 2025 EO) — directs agencies to build a “unified national approach” and to challenge state AI laws in court (a preemption-focused posture): a federal effort aimed not at regulating AI but at clearing regulation away.
- Sectoral + state patchwork — no federal horizontal law; finance/health/transport handle AI under existing sector rules, while California and Colorado pass piecemeal AI statutes — the fragmentation the Trump EO seeks to preempt.
- Security-lever exception (reported, June 2026). Cutting against the deregulatory arc, the US reportedly imposed export-control bans on two Anthropic models (Fable 5, Mythos 5) over a contested cyber-misuse/jailbreak claim (anthropic-export-ban-2026). Deregulating domestic conduct and wielding a hard security instrument are not opposites here — they coexist. (Heavily “reportedly”; see the source caveat.)
Where it sits on the wiki’s axes
- The fourth model. With the US paged, the spoke’s governance map is a clean four-way comparison of instrument philosophy: EU rights-driven horizontal-binding · China state-driven content-binding · US market-driven fragmented/deregulatory · Israel innovation-driven sectoral-soft (responsible-innovation). The US and Israel share the light-touch instinct, but for different reasons (preemptive deregulation vs. deliberate hub-strategy).
- Federal-vs-subnational tension. The US adds an axis the others lack: an internal preemption fight (federal deregulation vs. state statutes) — governance contested within a jurisdiction, not just across them.
- Convergence caveat holds. Even amid divergence on instruments, the US still references the oecd-ai-principles definitional layer the synthesis identifies as the shared substrate.
Related
eu-ai-act · china-ai-regulation · responsible-innovation · risk-based-regulation · nist-ai-rmf · export-controls-on-ai · anthropic-export-ban-2026 · ai-governance