EO 14365 'National Policy Framework for AI' — Preempts State AI Laws, Creates DOJ AI Litigation Task Force to Sue States, Conditions Federal Grants on Non-Regulation

On December 11, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14365, “Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence,” the capstone of the administration’s drive to establish a “minimally burdensome national standard” and block states from regulating AI. Its mechanisms: (1) a DOJ “AI Litigation Task Force” — to be stood up within 30 days — dedicated solely to challenging state AI laws in court on interstate-commerce and federal-preemption grounds; (2) conditional federal funding — states enacting or enforcing “onerous” AI laws may lose access to certain federal grants; (3) administrative preemption via a federal policy framework plus a Commerce directive to identify “potentially unconstitutional” state AI laws by March 11, 2026. Carve-outs preserve state laws on child-safety, AI compute/datacenter infrastructure, and state procurement. David Sacks (AI & Crypto Czar; 2024-12-05–sacks-named-ai-crypto-czar) was the driving figure; Trump framed it against the “meddling of 50 States.” NPR noted the preemption push “may not be legal.”

This is the load-bearing anchor of the administration’s AI-regulation doctrine and the proof-text for the deregulation-asymmetry finding. The posture was anti-regulation at every step — day-one repeal of Biden’s 2023 AI-oversight EO (Jan 20, 2025), the Jan 23, 2025 “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in AI” EO — but EO 14365 goes further than passive deregulation: it makes state AI regulation effectively illegitimate, deploying DOJ litigation + funding coercion to stop states from regulating at all. That doctrine is what makes the June 12, 2026 Anthropic action (2026-06-12–commerce-export-control-order-forces-anthropic-to-suspend-fable-5-mythos-5-worldwide) so revealing: the same administration that criminalizes AI regulation by others wielded the most muscular federal regulatory instrument available (export-control authority) to suspend one disfavored company’s product. The anti-regulation stance was never a neutral principle — it was the selective removal of constraints on favored actors; when the target is a firm that drew Pentagon red lines and sued DoD, robust regulatory power appears instantly. Selective-regulation-as-favoritism, with EO 14365 as the dated evidence that “deregulation” functioned as a doctrine of allied impunity. Sacks’s centrality ties the AI-policy apparatus to the Thiel-network substrate the corpus tracks.