Six months after President Trump warned state legislatures away from regulating artificial intelligence, the California state Senate passed the No Robo Bosses Act of 2026 by a vote of 29 to 9, barring employers from relying solely on automated systems to fire or discipline workers. The bill, Senate Bill 947, now heads to the Assembly. The federal preemption that was supposed to make it moot hasn’t materialized.

That gap, between a White House posture and an actual statute, is where the entire AI policy fight now lives.

Senator Jerry McNerney, a former member of Congress and co-founder of the House Artificial Intelligence Caucus, authored the California bill at the request of the state’s AFL-CIO. “Employers are increasingly using AI to boost productivity and achieve cost-savings, but there are no safeguards in place to prevent harm to workers,” McNerney said. The political backstory matters: Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a predecessor measure last fall, after which AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler and California labor leaders signaled they’d withhold support from any 2028 Newsom presidential bid unless he moved. Newsom has since signed an executive order directing state agencies to study job subsidies and stock-compensation policies to cushion AI-driven layoffs, citing recent cuts at Meta, Cisco and Block.

The pattern is bipartisan and uneven. In Florida, the State House declined to advance Governor Ron DeSantis’s proposed A.I. “Bill of Rights” covering children and consumer disclosure, with House Speaker Daniel Perez telling the Associated Press that Mr. Trump had made clear the federal government should lead. DeSantis’s reply was that Washington isn’t actually leading. Utah’s effort stalled outright after the White House sent a one-sentence memo warning the work would interfere with federal policy.

Congress has noticed the vacuum. Representative Jay Obernolte, Republican of California, and Representative Lori Trahan, Democrat of Massachusetts, introduced a bill that would impose some federal rules while barring state and local laws targeting model development for three years. It’s a structure familiar from the 1996 Telecommunications Act: trade light federal touch for sweeping preemption of the states.

Jina John, senior policy counsel for A.I. at the American Civil Liberties Union, told the Christian Science Monitor that states and cities “have been doing this work consistently for several years right now, and the federal government really has been playing catch-up.”

The preemption question, then, isn’t really about AI. It’s about whether a White House warning still freezes a legislature when the federal alternative remains a press release.

Sources