How the AI Framework Breaks Trump’s Promise to Kids, Artists and Communities
How the AI Framework Breaks Trump’s Promise to Kids, Artists and Communities
Publish Date: 2026-04-03 10:25:00
Source Domain: www.techpolicy.press
Brad Carson is president of Americans for Responsible Innovation (ARI) and a former congressman representing Oklahoma.
In December, the Trump administration released an executive order focused on preempting state artificial intelligence laws that featured an important caveat: any such prohibition would “ensure that children are protected, censorship is prevented, copyrights are respected, and communities are safeguarded.” The pledge was a political concession to protect these groups after two previous attempts to override state AI laws floundered in Congress following severe backlash from children’s safety advocates, artists and creators and state lawmakers.
But a promise on paper is only as strong as the policy behind it. With the March release of the Trump administration’s national AI policy framework, the public has the first opportunity to examine whether its pledge to protect kids, artists, and local communities holds water.
How does it measure up? Not well. Let’s take a closer look.
Eliminating protections for children
Nowhere are these shortcomings more apparent than in the framework’s perfunctory approach to protecting children online. The gaps fall into three clear categories: the absence of meaningful federal protections, the failure to preserve state laws that safeguard kids and a flawed understanding of how to protect children online in the AI era.
Over the past four years, children’s advocacy groups pushed for passage of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), the legal heart of which is the “duty of care.” This provision would require Big Tech companies to take “reasonable measures” to mitigate harms to users on their platforms, such as sexual exploitation, the spread of self-harm content and addictive platform features. If platforms fail to take such actions, they may be held liable for user harms.
The duty of care is so critical that when KOSA finally received a markup in the House earlier this year, dozens of advocacy groups opposed…
