The two-year federal moratorium on frontier artificial intelligence training runs collapsed in the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday afternoon, killed by a 24-21 vote that united every Republican on the panel with three moderate Democrats and effectively ended the most ambitious congressional effort yet to slow the build-out of large-scale AI systems.

The defeat came 15 days after the Senate narrowly cleared the bill 52-48 and capped a two-week lobbying blitz in which hyperscaler chief executives, utility lobbyists, organized labor and a coalition of safety-focused researchers fought for the votes of roughly a dozen wavering Democrats. By the time Chairman Vernon Buchanan, R-Fla., gaveled the roll call open at 2:14 p.m., aides on both sides said the outcome had been clear for at least 48 hours.

“This bill would have frozen American innovation in place while Beijing kept building,” Buchanan said in remarks immediately after the vote. “We share the concerns about the grid and about the labor market. We do not share the belief that a blanket pause is the answer.”

Reps. Terri Sewell of Alabama, Brad Schneider of Illinois and Don Davis of North Carolina were the three Democrats who broke with their caucus. All three represent districts with major data-center investments either under construction or recently announced, and all three had signaled discomfort with the bill’s training-compute cap during last week’s markup. A fourth Democrat, Rep. Linda Sanchez of California, had been considered a possible defector but voted yes after what aides described as a late-morning call from Sen. Bernie Sanders.

The legislation, formally the Pause on Advanced Artificial Intelligence Systems Act, would have imposed a 24-month halt on any training run exceeding 10^26 floating-point operations, required new federal licensing for frontier model deployment, and directed the Department of Energy to conduct a national assessment of AI-related electricity demand before any restart. Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., had framed it as a public-interest brake on a sector they argued had outrun both grid capacity and democratic oversight.

Ocasio-Cortez, speaking to reporters in a Capitol hallway shortly after the vote, called the result “a setback, not a verdict.”

“The data-center boom is going to keep colliding with people’s electric bills and their job prospects, and at some point this Congress is going to have to answer for that,” she said. “We will be back, and the next bill will be harder to ignore.”

Sanders, in a written statement, said he would introduce a narrower measure within “a matter of weeks” focused on grid-impact disclosure, mandatory worker-displacement reporting and a federal pre-deployment evaluation requirement for the largest models. Aides said the new draft would drop the headline training-compute cap that had drawn the most intense industry opposition.

Industry groups celebrated quickly but cautiously. The Information Technology Industry Council issued a statement within an hour calling the vote “the right outcome for American competitiveness,” while a joint letter from the chief executives of Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon and OpenAI thanked committee members and pledged to work with Congress on “targeted, evidence-based” rules. Privately, several lobbyists who worked the bill said the industry now expects state-level moratorium fights to accelerate, particularly in New York, California and Washington, where lawmakers in all three capitals have pre-filed companion measures keyed to the federal text.

“The trade is well understood inside the buildings,” said Maya Trent, a policy analyst at the Center for AI Governance who tracked the bill from introduction. “Industry won the fight it had to win, in Washington. The next twelve months will be 50 separate fights, and the politics in Sacramento and Albany are not the politics of Ways and Means.”

The vote also exposed cracks within the safety-focused coalition that had pushed the original bill. The Future of Life Institute, in a statement after the vote, called the result “disappointing but not surprising” and said it would shift resources toward state advocacy and toward a narrower licensing-only proposal being circulated by Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. Two researchers who had testified in favor of the moratorium at the April 3 Senate hearing said in interviews Wednesday evening that the bill’s all-or-nothing structure had been its central political vulnerability.

The White House response was muted. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, asked about the vote at the afternoon briefing, said President Donald Trump “has consistently said the United States must lead on artificial intelligence” and declined to say whether he would have signed the bill had it reached his desk. Trump himself, in a Truth Social post shortly after 4 p.m., wrote that the committee “did the right thing” and called the underlying bill “a gift to China.”

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, traveling in Texas, told reporters at a roundtable in Midland that the Department of Energy would proceed with its previously announced grid-impact study regardless of the bill’s fate. “The numbers are the numbers,” Wright said. “We are going to keep counting them.”

Markets, distracted for most of the day by oil’s continued post-ceasefire slide and by quarterly results from two large semiconductor firms, registered the vote modestly. NVIDIA closed up 1.4 percent, Microsoft up 0.9 percent and the broader Nasdaq Composite up 0.6 percent. Several utility stocks with heavy data-center exposure, including Dominion Energy and Constellation Energy, also closed higher.

Buchanan said the committee would turn next to a long-delayed tax-treaty package and to a hearing on semiconductor export controls scheduled for early May. Aides to Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez said a revised bill would be introduced before the Memorial Day recess.