Hawley: AI needs curbs on child safety, jobs, data centers

A US senator writing an op-ed about AI is normally forgettable, but the specifics in Sen. Josh Hawley's Free Press piece are worth reading because they show how Republican AI policy is hardening around three concrete pressure points at once. Hawley opens with a Festus, Missouri town-hall gymnasium packed for a vote on a $6 billion AI data center in a river city of about 14,000, and uses it as the scene-setter for a broader argument about who pays for the build-out.

The three pressure points are jobs, infrastructure, and child safety. On jobs, Hawley cites The Economist reporting that "nearly one in five American workers now believes AI or automation is likely to replace them," and rejects Silicon Valley's universal basic income pitch as getting "the diagnosis backward." On data centers, he calls for binding rules that force the companies to "supply their own power, protect residential rates, and safeguard local water." On safety, he recounts inviting the parents of a 16-year-old named Adam Raine, who began using ChatGPT for homework and, in Hawley's telling, came to confide in it before "Soon, Adam was dead," to testify before the Senate subcommittee he chairs. He also cites a "leaked internal Meta document" that he says had "explicitly authorized sensual conversations with minors."

The legislative vehicle to watch is the GUARD Act, which Hawley says the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously passed 22-0 in April, sending it to the Senate floor. The bill would "impose criminal penalties on companies whose products solicit children sexually or coach them toward self-harm." He lists five other bills, the GRID Act, the AI-Related Job Impacts Clarity Act, the AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act, the Artificial Intelligence Risk Evaluation Act, and the AI LEAD Act, but the op-ed doesn't spell out what each of those actually does.

The honest caveat is that this is an op-ed, not a report. Hawley is describing bills he authored and framing them favorably, and the piece doesn't show floor vote counts, White House alignment, industry response, or what "criminal penalties" would mean for executives versus corporate fines. Take the specifics of the six bills as advertised, not settled law.

The forward-looking read is that AI companies with consumer products aimed at minors, and hyperscalers negotiating utility and water deals in small towns, should assume the political ground is moving under them. Hawley's closing line is "We are not raw material in the hands of Silicon Valley. We are citizens." Whether the votes exist to back that up beyond one committee is the open question, but a 22-0 vote is the kind of number that tends to travel.