The Trump administration has a new strategy for killing AI regulation: calling up its own Republican state lawmakers and pressuring them to gut their bills before they pass.

Axios reports that White House officials have been leaning on GOP legislators in Nebraska and Tennessee to weaken or abandon AI transparency and child safety measures. One Republican state legislator described the outreach as "unelected bureaucrats weighing in on issues they shouldn't be." That legislator is a Republican. Criticizing the Trump White House. About AI safety. For kids.

The most revealing moment came during an April 7 committee hearing in Tennessee. Republican state Senator Ken Yager told colleagues that his Artificial Intelligence Public Safety and Child Protection Transparency Act had been "amended at the suggestion of the White House" after a phone call that morning. He added that the changes would "delete some portions of the bill."

Let that sink in. A Republican senator in Tennessee wrote a bipartisan AI bill to protect children from chatbots. The White House called him the morning of the hearing and told him to strip it down. He did it live, on camera, and admitted it was at the White House's direction.

Nebraska got the same treatment. LB1083, a Republican-led AI risk management and transparency bill, was amended to narrow its scope exclusively to chatbots. The broader AI safety framework was quietly killed.

This is the third state the White House has targeted. Back in February, Axios reported similar pressure on Utah to abandon an AI transparency and child safety bill. The pattern is unmistakable: any state AI regulation, even from Republicans, gets a phone call.

The White House's stated position is that it wants a "comprehensive AI framework" at the federal level. It released a four-page National AI Framework in March. The problem? Congress cannot agree on a single AI bill. There are 47 competing proposals. Not one has reached the floor.

So the administration's actual strategy is: block states from regulating AI while failing to regulate it federally. The result is a regulatory vacuum that benefits exactly one constituency: the AI companies spending hundreds of millions on midterm lobbying.

The cruelest irony is that these bills are not radical. They are transparency requirements. They protect kids from chatbots. They mirror laws already passed in California and New York. And they were written by Republicans who presumably thought they had the White House's back.

They did not.

First reported by Axios.