Mike Dubuski, who is the ABC News Technology reporter, is with us and Mike, let's talk about the big, beautiful bill of what's going on in terms of the world of technology and good morning. Thanks for joining us.
As always, Yeah, good morning to you. And this is a pretty interesting bill with regard to the technology sector. A number of provisions in this bill would or would have if they had kind of gone through, impacted both the AI sectors, the electric vehicle sectors, the energy sectors. The big one that got the most attention in recent
days is known as the AI moratorium. This was a provision in the Senate bill written by Marsha Blackburn of Texas and Ted Cruz of or excuse me, marsh Blackburn of Tennessee and Ted Cruz of Texas, and they essentially this measure would have instituted a temporary pause on state level AI regulation, basically saying, hey, yes, if you're a state government and you want to pass any sort of rule or legislation related to artificial intelligence, that's going to
be on hold. We're going to withhold some federal funding related to broadband access if you end up passing that law. In addition, a number of already passed laws at the state level would be preempted, would be essentially taken off the books, including a number in California, you know, more than two dozen, it appears, have already been passed. A number are you know, also sort of in the conversation waiting to be passed. So this was going to have
really big implications. The argument, of course, being that the AI sector and many lawmakers wanted to prevent this patchwork of state level legislation from emerging. This is going to be really difficult for companies like open ai and Google to navigate, in addition to some of their smaller competitors that maybe don't have the legions of lawyers to figure all that out. And the advocates for this piece of legislation, we're saying that this was going to effectively hinder AI
development at exactly the wrong moment. We don't want to take our foot off the gas when we're in this AI race with China. However, there were a lot of opposition to this particular measure, many Democrats but also Republicans pushing back on it. Seventeen Republican governors writing to the Majority leader and to the House Speaker calling for this AI moratorium to be stripped out of the bill even
within the AI space. Dario Amidae, who is the head of Anthropic, wrote in an op ed that this was a blunt instrument that gave us the worst of both worlds, both no ability for states to act on this fast
advancing technology and no federal policy to backstop it. And in recent hours bill we've seen that this has now been stripped out of the bill completely, with Marsha Blackburn, who again was one of the co authors of this piece of legislation, saying, until Congress passes federally preemptive legislation, we can't block states for making laws that protect their citizens.
Okay, fair enough, And it's kind of interesting because federal government can't block AI development, and so they do it sideways and say, if you don't do what we want, we control the bandwidth and we can get in that. So it's always the federal government either regulating where it can or paying for like in the world of education, you don't do what we want, you're not going to
get the federal money. Read what's going on with Harvard and the federal grants, the electric vehicle tax credit, which is going to disappear, and that seems to be more anti California than anything else. There are a lot of laws that are put up by the Trump administration that are straight at us. Is that going to disappear.
As it stands right now in the text of the bill, Yes, so after a one hundred and eighty day period, the federal EV tax credit would essentially disappear. That is the tax credit that is designed to incentivize the purchase of a new electric vehicle by basically kicking you a little bit of money depending on where your car is built, where the batteries come from. On a new electric vehicle, you can get up to seventy five hundred dollars off the cost of a new car up to four thousand
dollars off the cost of a used EV. And then there are various sort of leasing incentives involved there as well. Those leasing incentives would go away immediately if the bill is passed as it stands right now, and again that one hundred and eighty day period. It really sets up an interesting moment in the car space as consumers sort of are expected to rush to market to take advantage of this additional federal tax credit. While it's still in place.
You mentioned California. New York as well have state incentives for buying an electric car about two thousand dollars. Here in New York, it's almost ten thousand dollars off the cost of a new car. You can expect people would want to take advantage of that before it goes away, and that's going to create a real pressure point for dealers and for manufacturers as well.
Yeah, So there'll be a bump and a healthy one as people buy. And then as soon as the wawed disappears, as soon as the money that one is getting in rebates disappears, then the the number of evs are going to go south. Just in general the technology. One of the things about evs. I have an EV and I regret buying a pure electric car. What I should have done is bought a hybrid. Yeah, and I'm not alone, am I.
Yeah. This is a really interesting thing to view in the AI, in the EV space that you know, electric vehicle adoption we saw through sort of twenty twenty twenty twenty two really took off, right. We saw this huge amount of adoption, and in the last few years or so we've seen that start to level off. The amount of evs that people are buying is still growing. More evs are sold every year than they were the year prior.
But we have seen people start to move over into the hybrid space because they say it kind of splits the difference. Right in the commuting space. You can operate on pure electric power, save yourself some money, and then when it comes time to, you know, do those longer road trips that people occasionally do, you still have that gas motor to bank you up and for what it's worth, depending on the size of the battery in your hybrid,
specifically plug in hybrids. There's also some federal incentives attached to those which would be going away under the text of the bill as it stands right now.
All right, Mike, I know you've got plenty to do. When we have a hard out, we'll talk again. Thanks for your information.
As always, of course, guys, take care,