Josh Hawley

Josh Hawley (born 1979), the Yale Law-educated senator from Missouri elected in 2018 and author of “The Tyranny of Big Tech,” has fused populist-right politics with the most aggressive anti-AI agenda in Congress — attacking the industry over jobs, children, copyright and concentrated corporate power all at once.

Licensing, moratorium, GUARD

With Democrat Richard Blumenthal he ran the Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearings on AI in 2023 and co-authored a bipartisan framework calling for a licensing regime run by an independent oversight body, legal liability for AI harms, and export controls. In 2025 he led the revolt that stripped the proposed ten-year moratorium on state AI laws from the Republican budget bill — the Senate voted 99–1 to kill it — and in October 2025 introduced the GUARD Act, which would ban AI companions for minors and criminalize chatbots that solicit sexual content from children. His copyright hearings accused Meta of training on pirated books, and he has proposed blocking American AI firms from ties to Chinese models.

By 2026 Hawley was courting organized labor directly, telling a Teamsters convention that “AI cheerleaders” want to replace every job they can with an algorithm and that workers need rights over AI in the workplace. Libertarian critics — including Cato and the James Madison Institute — call his bills safety theater that would entrench incumbents and put bureaucrats, not parents, in charge; Hawley wears the industry’s opposition as a credential.