Issue: ORN-2026-12

Tech bills of the week: Child social media safety, Data center moratorium, and more: This week’s new bills aim to regulate multiple aspects of digital safety — such as child social media access, AI bias and environmental harm — while others update larger legislation to support emerging technology. Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., Jon Husted, R-Ohio, and Katie Britt, R-Ala., introduced new child safety legislation on Monday that aims to grant parents expanded access to protect their children who use social media platforms via advanced tools.  Called Sammy’s Law, named for 16-year-old Sammy Chapman who died after inadvertently procuring lethal drugs off of social media, the bill stipulates that large social media platforms must allow parents to receive safety notifications through third party safety providers regulated through the Federal Trade Commission.  The goal is for parents to be able to mitigate the harmful effects of social media platforms on their children. The bill specifically would require large social media companies with either 100 million active monthly users or companies that earn $1 billion in annual gross revenue to make new, real-time application programming interfaces for FTC-registered, third-party safety software providers.

On Thursday, a bipartisan team of House lawmakers introduced a bill that promotes more transparency into the inner workings of foundation artificial intelligence models.  The AI Foundation Model Transparency Act, introduced by Reps. Don Beyer. D-Va., Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., and Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., instructs the Federal Trade Commission to establish requirements for transparency in how leading large language models, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok, are created, with the goal of mitigating biased and harmful outputs. Beyer said in the press release. “This bill would help users determine if they should trust the model they are using for certain applications, and help identify limitations on data, potential biases, or misleading results. When a model’s bias could lead to harmful results like rejections for housing or loan applications, or faulty medical decisions, the importance of this reform becomes clear and very significant.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., introduced a bill on Wednesday that would set a moratorium on the construction of new data centers that are designed to support the growing volume of artificial intelligence compute. The Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act is focused on putting safety ahead of new AI infrastructure development. Its primary goals are to ensure AI tools and systems are safe and effective prior to market deployment, that economic gains of AI are equitably distributed and that ratepayers are protected from shouldering increased electricity costs. More information is posted on the NextGov website.

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Trump names CEOs, nuclear fusion founders and Nobel laureate to tech advisory council: Leadership from Big Tech is further cementing its presence in Washington as the White House unveiled the first 13 members that will compose the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Pursuant to an executive order President Donald Trump signed shortly after taking office, the PCAST is intended to advise the president and other administration officials on crafting the most accurate and comprehensive tech policy consistent with the administration’s goals. The inaugural members, unveiled on Wednesday, include several major tech company leaders, including NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Most of the new members work at the c-level of major tech companies: Sergey Brin, who cofounded Google alongside Larry Page in 1998 and now serves as a board member for Google parent company Alphabet; Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell; Oracle CEO Safra Catz; Oracle Co-Founder, former CEO and current Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison; and Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su. Leaders in venture capital and investment are also prevalent, such as Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Marc Andreessen; Coinbase cryptocurrency Co-Founder Fred Ehrsam; and entrepreneur David Friedberg. More information is posted on the NextGov website.