TEXAS — With the expansion of artificial intelligence (AI), fraud can happen over the phone with calls that sound like a loved one but are someone trying to rip you off.
“Whether it is a call or a text, an email message, or even through social media the IRS will not be contacting you, to ask you for any kind of personal information and surely any financial information,” said Lisa Rodriguez, director of AARP Texas.
Still, scams can be hard to identify as AI is virtually everywhere, and President Donald Trump wants the federal government to regulate it. In a broad framework, his administration laid out six focus areas for the growing AI sector: protecting children, preventing sky rocketing electricity costs from data center expansion, respecting intellectual property rights, preventing censorship, removing “unnecessary” barriers to innovation and educating Americans on AI.
“There’s a lot of state laws on the books that are doing really valuable things,” said Riki Parikh, the policy director at the Alliance for Secure AI.
Parikh says federal standards for technologies are preferable, but added the caveat is that the administration’s plan doesn’t replace many of the protections that are already in place in states like Texas.
The Texas Artificial Intelligence Council, created this year, oversees the governance of the technology, including state agency use and regulations for private companies. Texas law bans AI systems that manipulate people into self-harm, violence or criminal activity, while the federal framework says that states cannot regulate how AI is developed or penalize companies for unlawful activity.
“So essentially creating a liability shield that would undermine a lot of the enforcement mechanisms that are already in the Texas law where harm is caused by third parties and by these models,” said Parikh.
State Rep. Mihaela Plesa, D-Plano — one of the co-authors of the bipartisan state AI law — welcomes the federal regulations as a baseline but not as an overhaul.
“My concern is when we’re creating weak national standards that blocks the states from going forward. That doesn’t protect families. That doesn’t protect children from exploitation. The only people that that protects is the companies who have chosen to move fast and break the trust from families and their communities,” said Plesa.
A bipartisan group of state senators spoke out against Trump’s efforts late last year to block states from enforcing their own regulations, but U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R- Texas, argued that a patchwork of state regulations will hinder AI progress.
“It’s a race, and if China wins the race, whoever wins the values of that country will affect all of AI,” Cruz said in December.
Cruz repeated his claim on Friday after the release of the framework, writing that the president “is taking meaningful steps… to protect our values of free speech and ensure American leadership in AI.”
Still, Plesa plans to push for legislation during the next legislative session to further restrict chatbots, like Grok from Elon Musk’s xAI, from producing explicit images of minors.
