Technologies

Congress Might Halt State AI Regulations. What It Means for You and Your Privacy

House Republicans are proposing a 10-year moratorium on the enforcement of state rules around artificial intelligence.

States will not be able to enforce their regulations on artificial intelligence technology for a decade under a plan being considered in the US House of Representatives. The legislation, in an amendment accepted this week by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, says no state or political subdivision «may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems or automated decision systems» for 10 years. The proposal would still need the approval of both chambers of Congress and President Donald Trump before it can become law.

AI developers and some lawmakers have said federal action is necessary to keep states from creating a patchwork of different rules and regulations across the US that could slow the technology’s growth. The rapid growth in generative AI since ChatGPT exploded on the scene in late 2022 has led companies to fit the technology in as many spaces as possible. The economic implications are significant, as the US and China race to see which country’s tech will predominate, but generative AI poses privacy, transparency and other risks for consumers that lawmakers have sought to temper.

«We need, as an industry and as a country, one clear federal standard, whatever it may be,» Alexandr Wang, founder and CEO of the data company Scale AI, told lawmakers during an April hearing. «But we need one, we need clarity as to one federal standard and have preemption to prevent this outcome where you have 50 different standards.»

Efforts to limit the ability of states to regulate artificial intelligence could mean fewer consumer protections around a technology that is increasingly seeping into every aspect of American life. «There have been a lot of discussions at the state level, and I would think that it’s important for us to approach this problem at multiple levels,» said Anjana Susarla, a professor at Michigan State University who studies AI. «We could approach it at the national level. We can approach it at the state level too. I think we need both.»

Several states have already started regulating AI

The proposed language would bar states from enforcing any regulation, including those already on the books. The exceptions are rules and laws that make things easier for AI development and those that apply the same standards to non-AI models and systems that do similar things. These kinds of regulations are already starting to pop up. The biggest focus is not in the US, but in Europe, where the European Union has already implemented standards for AI. But states are starting to get in on the action.

Colorado passed a set of consumer protections last year, set to go into effect in 2026. California adopted more than a dozen AI-related laws last year. Other states have laws and regulations that often deal with specific issues such as deepfakes or require AI developers to publish information about their training data. At the local level, some regulations also address potential employment discrimination if AI systems are used in hiring.

«States are all over the map when it comes to what they want to regulate in AI,» said Arsen Kourinian, partner at the law firm Mayer Brown. So far in 2025, state lawmakers have introduced at least 550 proposals around AI, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In the House committee hearing last month, Rep. Jay Obernolte, a Republican from California, signaled a desire to get ahead of more state-level regulation. «We have a limited amount of legislative runway to be able to get that problem solved before the states get too far ahead,» he said.

While some states have laws on the books, not all of them have gone into effect or seen any enforcement. That limits the potential short-term impact of a moratorium, said Cobun Zweifel-Keegan, managing director in Washington for the International Association of Privacy Professionals. «There isn’t really any enforcement yet.»

A moratorium would likely deter state legislators and policymakers from developing and proposing new regulations, Zweifel-Keegan said. «The federal government would become the primary and potentially sole regulator around AI systems,» he said.

What a moratorium on state AI regulation means

AI developers have asked for any guardrails placed on their work to be consistent and streamlined. During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, that an EU-style regulatory system «would be disastrous» for the industry. Altman suggested instead that the industry develop its own standards.

Asked by Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, if industry self-regulation is enough at the moment, Altman said he thought some guardrails would be good but, «It’s easy for it to go too far. As I have learned more about how the world works, I am more afraid that it could go too far and have really bad consequences.» (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, parent company of CNET, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Concerns from companies — both the developers that create AI systems and the «deployers» who use them in interactions with consumers — often stem from fears that states will mandate significant work such as impact assessments or transparency notices before a product is released, Kourinian said. Consumer advocates have said more regulations are needed, and hampering the ability of states could hurt the privacy and safety of users.

«AI is being used widely to make decisions about people’s lives without transparency, accountability or recourse — it’s also facilitating chilling fraud, impersonation and surveillance,» Ben Winters, director of AI and privacy at the Consumer Federation of America, said in a statement. «A 10-year pause would lead to more discrimination, more deception and less control — simply put, it’s siding with tech companies over the people they impact.»

A moratorium on specific state rules and laws could result in more consumer protection issues being dealt with in court or by state attorneys general, Kourinian said. Existing laws around unfair and deceptive practices that are not specific to AI would still apply. «Time will tell how judges will interpret those issues,» he said.

Susarla said the pervasiveness of AI across industries means states might be able to regulate issues like privacy and transparency more broadly, without focusing on the technology. But a moratorium on AI regulation could lead to such policies being tied up in lawsuits. «It has to be some kind of balance between ‘we don’t want to stop innovation,’ but on the other hand, we also need to recognize that there can be real consequences,» she said.

Much policy around the governance of AI systems does happen because of those so-called technology-agnostic rules and laws, Zweifel-Keegan said. «It’s worth also remembering that there are a lot of existing laws and there is a potential to make new laws that don’t trigger the moratorium but do apply to AI systems as long as they apply to other systems,» he said.

Technologies

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Technologies

My Camera Test: Comparing the $499 Pixel 10A With the Galaxy S25 FE, Motorola Edge

The Pixel 10A’s cameras are similar to those on the 9A, but it still performs quite well compared to other phones in its price range.

Google’s $499 Pixel 10A uses nearly the same cameras as last year’s Pixel 9A, but I wanted to see how its photos directly match up to its midrange Android rivals: the $650 Samsung Galaxy S25 FE and the $550 Motorola Edge.

I traveled with all three phones around St. Petersburg, Florida, checking how flexible each was in different environments, from bright outdoor settings to an indoor coffee shop and an evening brewery. All three environments can be challenging for the small image sensors on each phone.

While I find the cameras on all three phones to have different strengths and weaknesses depending on the setting, I’m quite impressed with how the Pixel 10A keeps up. In my tests, the photos include lots of detail, even though certain settings appear to involve a lot of processing to improve them.

Wide and telephoto cameras

Starting with photos taken on the sidewalk in downtown St. Petersburg, I notice that all three phones handle bright sunlight slightly differently, especially how it’s depicted on the street.

For the Pixel 10A, the sun provides a slight exposure mark over the Bay First sign at the top of the frame, but it remains fairly cordoned off to focus on the rest of the streetscape. Zooming in, you can see the Century 21 location, but the street is captured in the most detail, with the phone’s camera maintaining its natural gray color.

For both the Galaxy S25 FE and the Motorola Edge, the sun has a more pronounced effect on the rest of the image. The pavement’s color is notably brighter. I also find both the S25 FE and the Edge have slightly more clarity on the business signs on the Bay First building, including the aforementioned Century 21 logo.

Since the S25 FE and the Edge each include a telephoto camera that supports 3x optical zoom, I took a photo at that zoom with each phone. The Pixel 10A uses digital zoom on the phone’s 48-megapixel wide camera, but a lot of the scene’s detail remains preserved.

The Pixel’s zoom photo provides a clear view of the 7th St N sign, the trees and the plants. However, if you look further back at the next intersection, you’ll notice that the 7th St S sign and the Colony Grill are much harder to see. It’s those smaller details that are captured by the S25 FE and the Edge, both aided by telephoto cameras, making them more visible.

Of the three zoom photo examples, I feel like the S25 FE has the best color reproduction while also retaining details like the signs further back. Even though the photo was taken with the S25 FE’s 8-megapixel telephoto camera rather than its 50-megapixel wide camera, the colors remain complementary when comparing the 1x to the 3x. Meanwhile, the Edge’s 10-megapixel telephoto camera looks quite a bit different from the 50-megapixel wide camera — the whole image has a more yellowish hue.

Ultrawide cameras

Moving inside the Southern Grounds coffee shop, I decided to use the ultrawide cameras to capture my sausage, egg and cheese on toast. The three photos came out wildly different.

The Pixel 10A’s 13-megapixel ultrawide and S25 FE’s 12-megapixel ultrawide have a more balanced set of colors and details, in my opinion. The wheat toast appears lighter in the Pixel’s photo than in the darker hues captured by both the S25 FE and the Edge.

When zooming into my notebook, however, the Pixel and S25 FE captured more of the page markings, details that blur together more in the photo taken by the Edge. While the Edge’s 50-megapixel ultrawide camera is a higher-spec number, I noticed it had a harder time distinguishing toast levels, giving more of it a darker look. If I hadn’t eaten it myself, I’d have thought it was burned based on the Edge’s photo.

Night photography

Moving over to a nighttime setting, I used the three phones to take photos outside of 3 Daughters Brewing. I felt like all three did a decent job at producing the colors of the building, but they differ in how they handle light sources.

Both the Pixel and the S25 FE tone back the glare produced by the various lighting fixtures. Meanwhile, the Edge’s photos show noticeable streaks that dominate the sky. When inspecting the photos more closely, I find that the Galaxy captured a sharper view of the furniture, like in the Connect 4 set next to the blue chairs in the center of the frame. The same details are visible in the Pixel’s and the Edge’s depictions of the scene, but they appear smudgy by comparison.

This type of scene needs to take advantage of a phone’s processing power in order to iron out visibility issues, and I do find that the Edge appears to come up short here in this regard, with a lot of noticeable image noise.

Selfies

Each phone takes selfies with noticeable differences in style and color choices. For this test example, I’m in a well-lit daytime room with natural light from a window. The 12-megapixel front-facing camera on Google’s Pixel 10A brightened up my face as if there was a light in front of me, and captured a decent amount of the details of my hair and face.

The front-facing camera on Samsung’s Galaxy S25 FE shows a noticeably darker color tone, but it still captures a similar shade of orange on the wall behind me. Of the three photos, I felt like the S25 captures the most details, including strands of hair, and defaulted to a closer crop than the other two.

The photos taken by the 50-megapixel selfie camera on the Motorola Edge feel a bit smoothed out. The orange color on the wall is noticeably different from the Pixel and the S25 FE, though it does capture a lot of my face details, from hair strands to the fabric textures on my shirt.

The $499 Pixel 10A camera keeps up and, in some cases, exceeds the detail captured by the slightly more expensive $550 Motorola Edge and $650 Galaxy S25 FE. I’m quite impressed by how the Pixel camera handles colors and low-light environments, but the phone’s processing work sometimes makes scenes appear brighter than they are in real life.

The Galaxy S25 FE is no slouch either, with a third telephoto lens for capturing more detail farther away. While I did find the Motorola Edge to struggle in low light, it is one of the lowest-cost phone options currently available for someone who must have a 3x optical telephoto camera.

But if you can live without the telephoto lens, the Pixel 10A’s low cost and photography abilities will likely be a good fit for most people.

Google’s Pixel 10A Looks Stylish for a Low-Cost Flagship Phone

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Technologies

Today’s NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for March 14 #741

Here are hints and answers for the NYT Strands puzzle for March 14, No. 741.

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Does today’s date seem memorable to you? If so, today’s NYT Strands puzzle might be easy. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story.

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: A math teacher’s favorite dessert.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: 3.14

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

RITE, SPIT, TIPS, STAT, STATE, GIVE, RUST, FINE, LAZE, SURE, PEAL

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

VENT, CRUST, FRUIT, EDGES, GLAZE, FILLING, LATTICE

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is HAPPYPIDAY. To find it, start with the H that’s six rows down and three to the right from the upper-left corner, and make — well, a pie shape.