Ted Cruz
U.S. Senator from Texas
Texas senator and Commerce Committee chair who led the push for a federal moratorium on state AI laws and introduced the SANDBOX Act letting AI firms apply to waive federal regulations.
In his words
If the United States fails to lead, the values that infuse AI development and deployment will not be American ones, but the values of regimes that use AI to control rather than to liberate.
A regulatory sandbox is not a free pass. People creating or using AI still have to follow the same laws as everyone else.
Biography
Ted Cruz (born 1970), Texas senator since 2013 and chair of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, has become Washington’s most aggressive deregulator on AI. Where most legislators debate what rules to write, Cruz has focused on erasing them — state rules especially.
Moratorium and sandbox
In 2025 Cruz championed a ten-year federal moratorium on state and local AI regulation, attached to the summer budget bill. The gambit collapsed spectacularly — the Senate stripped it 99–1 in July 2025 after a bipartisan revolt led in part by Marsha Blackburn — but Cruz kept pressing preemption through other vehicles. That September he unveiled a five-pillar “light-touch” AI framework and the SANDBOX Act, which would let AI developers apply to waive or modify federal agency regulations for renewable two-year terms, with the OSTP director as gatekeeper.
Cruz frames all of it as a race with Beijing: American leadership, in his telling, is the precondition for AI reflecting values of liberty rather than control. Consumer groups and many state attorneys general counter that his agenda strips the only protections that currently exist — state laws on deepfakes, algorithmic discrimination, and children’s safety — while offering nothing federal in their place. Even some Republicans balked at preempting their own legislatures.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/ted-cruz