Wisconsin Republicans And Democrat Unite To Defend State AI Authority

A crane stretches across the Madison skyline Tuesday, April 28, 2026, in Madison, Wis. Angela Major/WPR

Wisconsin lawmakers are calling on Congress to reject a bill to limit state governments’ abilities to regulate the training of large language models like Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini.

Over 200 lawmakers from around the country signed on to a petition against the congressional effort to block state AI regulation. Five Wisconsin lawmakers signed on.

On WPR’s “Wisconsin Today,” state Rep. Clinton Anderson, D-Beloit, said he signed the petition because he wants to keep working across the aisle to draft an AI framework that’s best for Wisconsin.

“We’ve had some good progress in Wisconsin on regulating AI and we haven’t had this become a horrible partisan issue yet,” said Anderson, the only Wisconsin Democrat on the petition. “I think we’ve seen some progress and we should continue to make that progress.”

The letter to Congress warns the Great American AI Act’s “broad preemption provisions” would freeze state laws and block locals from acting at a time when the public is increasingly concerned about the new technology.

A June Pew Research poll found that 40 percent of Americans predict that the impact of AI on society will be largely negative. Meanwhile, only 16 percent believe AI programs will have a largely positive impact.

Rep. Adam Neylon, a Republican representing the Pewaukee area, told “Wisconsin Today” the state already has some AI regulations on the books such as banning sexually explicit AI-generated “deepfake” images of someone without consent.

Neylon is vice chair of the Legislature’s AI in Healthcare Study Committee. His priorities for additional AI regulation include healthcare and greater privacy protections for things that are “too easy to share online.”

“We need to make sure we’re protecting that,” he said. “We need to make sure that we have certain parameters about what information, confidential information, is being able to be shared through AI and what people are able to take out of that.”

The Trump administration argued the need for an executive order last year limiting state AI regulation was that Trump didn’t want to see drastically different laws from state to state.

Both Neylon and Anderson agreed that they’d like to see a national standard for AI regulation.

“While we don’t need a patchwork, we also should not be tying the hands of the people closest to these issues at the state level,” Neylon said.

The Trump executive order threatens to cut funding for broadband and other infrastructure if states pass laws the administration considers “onerous.”

“Letting them just make an arbitrary decision on what they like and they don’t like and then holding things like broadband funding hostage is not the way to go,” Anderson said. “The federal government should be a partner with the state government and not an adversary.”

Bipartisan Wisconsin lawmakers oppose federal moves to limit state AI regulation was originally published by Wisconsin Public Radio.