The AI Republic? Governing Artificial Intelligence at America’s 250th Anniversary

With America’s 250th anniversary amid a potentially massive technological and societal upheaval, the country finds itself confronting a familiar question for a new problem: how do you govern a reshaping society faster than its institutions can adapt?

In 1776, the Declaration of Independence was adopted as our founders declared their independence from the old standards of governance to set out to establish a new nation based on self-governance based on core principles—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In the wake of the American Revolution, they faced the challenge of building a durable framework that would support the changing needs and desires of individual states and diverse communities making up a nation for generations to come. The resulting Constitution was a highly ambitious attempt to balance stability, personal freedoms and security with specialized concerns and interests of the day. Now, 250 years later, we find ourselves in a similar struggle as we work to govern rapidly developing artificial intelligence (AI) without sacrificing our core principles.

The AI revolution we are experiencing today is unfolding at extraordinary speed. Generative AI systems are transforming virtually every knowledge-based industry that exists. Investors in both public and private markets are pouring previously unheard amounts of funding into AI infrastructure, model development, robotics, semiconductors, and autonomous systems, and strategic acquirers are racing to secure talent, compute capacity, proprietary data, and defensible AI applications before their competition. Job displacement hovers over us as a looming threat, and we are already facing multiple existential crises relating to the role of AI in the determination of who and how individuals and businesses are able to exercise their rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness when the three principals are even more at odds with each other than ever. We are having national discussions on the use of AI in war and surveillance, medicine and education, along with who controls the development and release of AI systems, who accesses them, and how we collect the information that feed and build them. However, so much of that discussion is happening after-the-fact simply because the speed of our regulatory system cannot keep up with the exponential level of technological progress.

That speed and shifting landscape, coupled by varying interests and borderless application of AI systems and solutions and the immense stakes the “AI arms races” may have on global economic power and security have resulted in irresolute governments across the globe struggling to define the rules and regulations that govern AI.

With the approaching 250th anniversary, the answer that feels right and patriotic is to say “don’t worry—we can apply our consensus-based regulatory system here and we can deal with the changing landscape within a finite set of laws and regulations that stay true to our values without expanding over our personal liberties” and point to the lasting success (at least “mostly” success) of the constitution and bill or rights in our current history in overcoming and adapting to cultural movements, technological changes and geopolitical shifts with the strength of our civic identity, based on our core shared values.

However, critics with this consensus-based value-driven regulatory approach—our “regulatory republic” will note that AI presents a fundamentally different challenge. Artificial intelligence systems operate globally, instantaneously, and often outside traditional geographic or cultural boundaries. The societal consensus that once helped stabilize constitutional governance is far weaker in a digitally fragmented world shaped by algorithms, misinformation, geopolitical competition, and increasingly polarized institutions, and differing interests that clash directly with our value systems.

That raises an important question as America reaches its 250th anniversary: whether broad value-based frameworks enforced through a complex regulatory consensus building approach where competing interests and desires are considered are equipped to govern technologies with this kind of unprecedented scale and autonomy. Historically, our constitutional republic has resulted in us leaning toward this more malleable but slow-reacting approach. However, given the speed and consequences at stake, AI may require something closer to commandment-based boundaries, clear “do not cross” lines designed to preserve human autonomy and democratic stability regardless of market incentives or technological capability.

We are seeing some of these lines already—along with the dangers of blurring those lines. Debates and movements relating to prohibitions on autonomous lethal weapons systems, AI-generated fraud, social scoring, election manipulation, unauthorized biometric surveillance, deepfake impersonation, and certain forms of algorithmic discrimination reflect a growing consensus that some uses of AI are incompatible with democratic society, regardless of the restrictions on personal liberties. The European Union has gone some of the furthest in formal regulation: when the first prohibitions under its AI Act took effect on Feb. 2, 2025, they did not balance competing interests or wait for harm to be proved case by case. They drew certain hard lines including banning government social scoring and manipulative systems aimed at the vulnerable, sharply restricting real-time biometric surveillance, and backed them with significant monetary penalties, including those reaching €35 million or seven percent of global revenue.

The American picture is less settled, and the past year has shown how quickly the ground can move. In 2025, the House folded into its budget bill a ten-year moratorium that would have barred every state from enforcing its own AI laws; the Senate struck it down ninety-nine to one, and the budget bill became law without that moratorium on the Fourth of July last year. Into that vacuum some states stepped in—California enacted the country’s first frontier-AI transparency law, going into effect this year, while others grew hesitant—Colorado, having pioneered a duty of care against algorithmic discrimination, delayed and narrowed its own statute before it ever took effect. The executive arm meanwhile has not been shy to use existing regulations, including this past June when the U.S. federal government used export controls to order one of the country’s leading AI developers to temporarily cut off all foreign access to its two most capable models overnight and again in the last few weeks to enforce similar restrictions on its competitors. And in this public-facing battle we saw the issues with our current governance model in tackling AI regulation—one attempting to set an “absolute boundary” vs. a system based on facts-and-circumstances built regulation encouraging limited government interference—neither inherently wrong but imperfect structures as we balance human, global, national and personal interests.

In many ways, such flaws and the need for further evolution in governance mirrors lessons learned through earlier periods of national and global crisis and change. The Civil War tested whether constitutional ideals alone were sufficient to preserve human equality and national unity. The World Wars forced democracies to confront the consequences of industrialized technology operating without moral constraint. The postwar period produced new governance systems, international alliances, and human rights frameworks designed to establish hard boundaries around what modern societies would permit. The AI era may represent a similar inflection point.

So now, at 250 years, America is not simply celebrating the aspirations of its founding generation but also facing down this new inflection point. The question now is whether the next generation of AI governance will—and should—remain rooted in the current system, or whether the scale, speed and consequences of AI are not “light and transient causes” and require that we adopt a different approach when it comes to AI. That approach could resemble the EU-based approach of drawing certain hardlines or an even a more authoritarian stance with a direct gateway of governmental control, or on the opposite end, a clear deregulation that addresses the economic and societal effects of global regulatory imbalances. In making such drastic movements, we may declare our independence from the regulatory republic.

Reprinted with permission from the July 2, 2026 edition of The Recorder ©2026 ALM Global Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission is prohibited, contact 877-256-2472 or [email protected]