Sen. Ted Cruz’s Senate Commerce Committee has slipped its full AI markup into September, according to Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney’s legislative tracker, the second reschedule after Cruz’s original July 29 target and a subsequent August 3 aim reported by Bloomberg Law. The August 5 Executive Session Cruz’s office noticed on July 29 covered kids safety, not AI.

The delay isn’t procedural drift. It’s the sound of a preemption fight that hasn’t converged.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn is negotiating what her spokesperson calls a “subject-matter preemption” framework: states would be barred only from legislating on the same subject matter as the new federal standard, not from AI regulation broadly. Blackburn’s package, per The Hill, would move alongside the Kids Online Safety Act, the No Fakes Act, and age verification. Sens. John Thune and Amy Klobuchar are drafting a separate catastrophic-risk bill that may join the markup.

The stakes clarified on September 1, when the California legislature sent Gov. Gavin Newsom 26 AI and social media bills covering chatbot disclosures, surveillance pricing, and healthcare AI. A subject-matter preemption bill wouldn’t erase that patchwork, but it could neutralize the disclosure regimes that overlap the federal text, while FTC enforcement and child-safety carve-outs sit outside its perimeter.

The Hill notes the Oval Office negotiations haven’t produced final text, and passage this Congress is described as an uphill battle. That’s the tell. Cruz isn’t waiting on a whip count; he’s waiting on language nobody has written yet. Every week the markup drifts, California’s clock keeps running.

Sources

Sources