The White House on Thursday circulated a competing artificial intelligence framework to congressional leaders, sketching a regulatory approach built around disclosure, energy reporting and a voluntary safety-evaluation regime, as Democratic-led legislatures in New York and California moved within hours to advance their own moratorium bills and reshape a fight that had appeared to end on Capitol Hill the day before.

The 17-page outline, branded the American AI Resilience and Leadership Plan, was hand-delivered to senior staff for the Senate majority and minority leaders, the Speaker, and the chairs and ranking members of seven committees beginning shortly after 7 a.m., according to two administration officials and three congressional aides who reviewed it. It carries no draft legislative text and stops well short of the 24-month training pause that the House Ways and Means Committee rejected 24-21 on Wednesday. But its release, less than 20 hours after that vote, signaled that the administration intends to claim ownership of the AI policy debate rather than cede it to a state-by-state patchwork.

“The president believes American AI leadership requires both speed and seriousness,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a midmorning briefing. “What you are seeing today is a framework that secures the lead, lights up the grid and tells the American people what is being built in their communities. It is the alternative the country has been waiting for.”

The plan, drafted under the supervision of the National Economic Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy, would require operators of any training cluster above an unspecified compute threshold to file quarterly disclosures with the Department of Energy on power draw, water use and projected workforce impact. It directs the Commerce Department to develop a voluntary pre-deployment evaluation protocol for frontier models in coordination with industry consortia, and asks the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to publish national guidance for data-center interconnection queues within 120 days. A separate provision invites Congress to legislate federal pre-emption of state AI rules, language several Democrats said they regarded as the document’s most contentious element.

“There is real material in here, and there is also a pre-emption land mine wrapped in a bow,” said Senator Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, after a briefing from administration officials Thursday afternoon. “We can talk about disclosure. We are not going to pass a bill that tells Sacramento and Albany to stand down.”

The state-level response was immediate and pointed. In Albany, the Assembly’s Science and Technology Committee voted 18-7 by midafternoon to advance the New York Artificial Intelligence Safety Act, which would impose an 18-month state-level pause on the construction of new training facilities exceeding a defined power draw within state borders and require existing operators to register with a new state office. The bill’s lead sponsor, Assemblywoman Latrice Walker, D-Brooklyn, said the federal defeat had given the state effort “rocket fuel.”

“The hyperscalers spent thirty days telling Washington that Albany and Sacramento couldn’t handle this,” Walker said in a brief interview between votes. “We are going to find out together whether that was true.”

In Sacramento, the California Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee reported a companion measure favorably Thursday afternoon on a party-line vote. State Senator Josh Becker, the bill’s author, said he expected the measure to reach the Senate floor before mid-May. Washington state, Massachusetts, Illinois, Minnesota and Colorado have introduced or pre-filed similar legislation, although none has yet advanced to a committee vote.

Industry reaction to the federal framework was carefully measured. The Information Technology Industry Council called the White House plan “a constructive starting point” and said members would engage on the disclosure provisions. A statement issued jointly by the chief executives of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and OpenAI thanked the administration for “moving past the moratorium debate.” Privately, several lobbyists said the federal pre-emption clause would be the industry’s central ask in any legislative negotiation.

“The vote on Wednesday solved one problem and created two,” said Maya Trent, a policy analyst at the Center for AI Governance who has tracked the moratorium since its introduction. “The first problem was the Sanders bill. The other two are New York and California. If the White House framework cannot pull pre-emption out of those state fights, the industry has not really won anything yet.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who had pledged within hours of Wednesday’s defeat to reintroduce a narrower federal bill, used Thursday to begin what aides described as a national push. Sanders held a town hall in Burlington in the morning and was scheduled to address a labor rally in Detroit on Friday. Ocasio-Cortez, in an evening appearance on MSNBC, called the administration framework “a press release dressed up as a policy” and said the only meaningful regulation in the next 12 months would come from state capitals and the courts.

“They lost the bill. They have not lost the argument,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Every utility bill that arrives in a swing district between now and November is going to do our organizing for us.”

A Marist poll released Thursday morning found 54 percent of registered voters disapproved of the House outcome, with disapproval running highest in suburban districts that have absorbed significant data-center construction. Republican strategists who had pressed for the bill’s defeat argued the issue would lose salience by the fall as energy markets stabilized and consumer electricity prices eased alongside post-ceasefire oil declines.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in remarks to reporters at a Department of Energy event in Houston, said the administration framework was “the right shape” but added that the department’s separate grid-impact study, ordered earlier in the spring, would proceed independently and report findings by the end of the third quarter. Wright said the study had already documented “double-digit gigawatt” demand additions associated with AI training clusters in five states.

Senate Majority Leader Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said the chamber would hold hearings on the administration framework beginning the week of May 4, with the goal of producing a bipartisan draft before the Memorial Day recess. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, in a written statement, said Democrats would “engage seriously” but warned that any final package without grid-impact teeth and without preserving state authority would fail in the Senate.

White House officials said additional details, including the unspecified compute threshold and the structure of the pre-deployment evaluation board, would be released in a longer document before the May 4 hearings.