MIAMI- President Donald Trump's preferred candidate for Florida governor has broken with him on one of the fastest-moving fights in American politics: who gets to regulate artificial intelligence.
Rep. Byron Donalds, the Trump-backed Republican running to succeed Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2026, said Monday that states should be allowed to take the lead in creating rules for AI. The comments came the same day Florida filed a first-in-the-nation lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, accusing the company behind ChatGPT of misleading the public about safety risks and failing to protect children.
"If you're going to talk about areas of disagreement, one where we have a slight disagreement is on AI policy," Donalds said, according to the Miami Herald. "I think that the states do need to lead when it comes to setting a regulatory framework."
That position puts Donalds at odds with Trump, who has pushed for a national AI framework designed to limit state-by-state regulation. In a December executive order, Trump said U.S. AI companies "must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation" and warned that "excessive State regulation" could hurt American competitiveness.
The order argued that a patchwork of 50 different state AI laws would make compliance harder for companies and directed federal officials to challenge state rules that conflict with the administration's AI policy.
Donalds framed his position as a practical one. He said Congress moves too slowly to be the only source of AI policy and argued that states cannot wait while new technologies reshape privacy, speech, identity, and public safety.
"It's so difficult getting good policy through that place," Donalds said, referring to Congress.
The timing made the split more striking. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed suit Monday against OpenAI and Altman, alleging the company "knowingly released and aggressively marketed ChatGPT" while concealing serious risks. According to NBC, Uthmeier said Florida is the first state to sue OpenAI and accused the company of ignoring safety warnings.
"OpenAI and Altman ignored internal and external safety warnings, put children at great risk, and allowed a dangerous product to reach millions of Floridians," Uthmeier said.
The lawsuit claims ChatGPT has harmed children by offering dangerous responses related to self-harm, violence, and crime planning. It also accuses OpenAI of collecting data from minors without meaningful parental oversight and of downplaying the risks of emotional dependency on AI chatbots.
OpenAI has denied that its product is designed to encourage harm. The company said in a statement that ChatGPT is a general-purpose tool used by hundreds of millions of people and that it works to strengthen safeguards, detect dangerous intent and respond when safety risks arise.
The lawsuit places Donalds in a politically delicate position. Trump endorsed him early in the Florida governor's race, giving him a major advantage in a Republican primary where loyalty to the president remains a defining issue. But AI has created a rare opening where Florida Republicans are not all following Washington's lead.
DeSantis has also pushed for more state authority over AI, including an "AI Bill of Rights" meant to protect Floridians from misuse of the technology. Donalds' comments move him closer to that state-centered approach, even as Trump seeks a lighter national standard.
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