Senator Elizabeth Warren has accused the biggest AI companies of trying to write their own regulatory ceiling into a trade agreement, using the machinery of US trade policy to lock in limits on oversight that Congress has so far declined to grant them.
The accusation, reported by Reuters on July 23, extends a fight the Massachusetts Democrat has waged for more than a year.
Her argument is that Big Tech is quietly turning contested domestic questions into trade concessions, the same logic behind the trade probe into EU tech rules that lawmakers pushed the administration to open.
The mechanism she points to is a clause, not a headline. A run of recent US bilateral deals, catalogued in a Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis of what it calls a “containment doctrine”, carry near-identical “non-discrimination” language that bars partners from measures that “discriminate against U.S. digital services”.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!That wording is broad enough to reach the rules the industry has spent two years trying to blunt: the EU’s Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, and the patchwork of state AI statutes that Washington has separately tried to preempt at home. A rule that survives a state legislature can still be challenged as a trade barrier abroad.
