What government is and isn't regulating in tech. From a Capitol insider turned founder.
 | Laura Luise Davis, Co-Founder & CBO at USLege |
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Second edition.
I spent a decade in the rooms where laws get written: the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, state capitals, and contract lobbying. I have sat in more hearing rooms than I can count. Here is what keeps me up at night: the government is barely talking about the technology that is about to reorder everything.
This week a humanoid robot got hands good enough to thread a cable and zip a jacket. On the front line, attack drones can now finish a strike on their own after their pilot's signal is cut. And China's four-legged robots, the ones with rifles on their backs, are the reason a bipartisan bill wants them banned from our shores.
So what was the biggest thing government did about any of it? None of the above. The biggest move was a genuine constitutional question: should Washington or the fifty states write the rules for AI? That is this issue. The machines are getting hands and guns, and the people who write our laws are working out who holds the pen.
I am pro-technology. I am also pro-paying-attention. Every week I watch what government is, and is not, regulating.
The future is in session, whether our legislatures show up for it or not.
Laura
///
THE FUTURE, SHIPPED
Three things that are real right now and sound like science fiction. And the question I keep asking: is anyone in government regulating them?
China's robot dogs are carrying rifles. Congress wants them banned.
What happened. A quadruped robot, the four-legged kind you have watched jog and climb stairs, is now a weapons platform. In a 2026 People's Liberation Army video, widely reported under the title "The Robot Dog's Time to Kill Has Come," a Unitree Go2 (a commercial robot dog that sells for about 3,000 dollars and can be driven from two miles away) trots across a range with an automatic rifle on its back and fires at a target. A 2025 Chinese training exercise mounted the same platforms with rifles and rocket launchers. Unitree says it is a civilian company and that third parties did the weaponizing. This is not a forecast. It is on video.
What was said. "We've seen backdoors in robots that would transmit information back to Chinese Communist interests."
Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI), Chairman, House Select Committee on the CCP, on CNBC, July 7, 2026.
Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI), Chair, House Select Committee on the CCP · Jul 7, 2026
▪ IS ANYONE REGULATING THIS?
Yes, and fast. This is the one item here that Washington is chasing in real time. On June 3, a bipartisan group led by Rep. Moolenaar introduced the GUARD Act (HR 9129), which would let the FCC place Chinese-made humanoid and quadruped robots on its Covered List and block them from the country, the same mechanism that just knocked new Chinese drones off the U.S. market. A companion effort, the American Security Robotics Act (S 4235), would bar federal agencies from buying Chinese ground robots. Both are proposals, not law: HR 9129 sits in House Energy and Commerce, S 4235 in Senate Homeland Security. The Pentagon has already named Unitree a Chinese military company.
A robot just got hands good enough to thread a cable.
What happened. On July 9, the robotics company 1X unveiled a new hand for NEO, its home humanoid. It has 25 degrees of freedom, tendons instead of gears, and fingertips that feel force. 1X showed it screwing in a lightbulb, plugging in a USB-C cable, zipping a jacket, and signing. Hands are the hardest problem in robotics, the reason most "humanoids" still do little more than walk and carry. 1X says it can build 10,000 of these a year and will ship one on every NEO.
What was said. "For seventy years, robotics worked around the hand problem. The humanoid bet is the reverse: it lives or dies at the fingertips."
Bernt Børnich, Founder and CEO, 1X, on X, July 9, 2026. He is a builder, not part of the congressional record, so the USLege clip below is the closest government voice on the same question.
Jeff Burnstein, President, Association for Advancing Automation (A3) · U.S. House Science, Apr 21, 2026
▪ IS ANYONE REGULATING THIS?
No one, not the part that matters. Scan USLege and there is no federal bill and no hearing that sets a safety or liability standard for a general-purpose humanoid working in your home. The only robot bills moving in Congress, the GUARD Act and the American Security Robotics Act, are about keeping Chinese robots out, not about making the American ones safe to stand next to. The industry has flagged the gap: at an April hearing, Jeff Burnstein, whose association wrote the first American robot safety standard, urged Congress to make sure these machines are "safe before they're around people, especially in our homes." No bill has taken him up on it. Even the government's own material sees it coming: in a May 2026 U.S. Administration for Community Living video, the Consumer Technology Association's Gail Levitan called the home humanoid, a "Jetsons-style butler," something that is "not such a fantasy anymore" and "could one day be helping you around the house." No legislature has written a rule for the day it does.
A drone can now finish the strike after it loses its pilot.
What happened. On the front line in Ukraine, FPV attack drones now use AI-assisted terminal guidance: the operator locks the drone onto a target from several hundred meters out, and the drone completes the final approach on its own, even if Russian jamming cuts the radio link. Ukraine rolled this out to beat electronic warfare. Analysts note that fully autonomous strikes, with no human picking the target, remain rare. The human still chooses. The machine now finishes.
What was said. "I believe we employ lethal capability that has an amount of autonomy in it every day... There is always a human in the kill chain."
Adm. Frank Bradley, Commander, U.S. Special Operations Command. House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, March 18, 2026.
Adm. Frank Bradley, Commander, U.S. Special Operations Command · House Armed Services, Mar 18, 2026
▪ IS ANYONE REGULATING THIS?
Barely, and only by policy. The U.S. military's position, stated on the record, is that "there is always a human in the kill chain," a line it holds under the law of armed conflict, not under any statute. Congress has not passed a law defining when, or whether, a machine may take a human life without a person in the loop. The FY2027 defense bill (HR 8800) funds more AI and autonomy, but no statute sets a human-in-the-loop requirement for lethal decisions. So adversaries are removing the human, the Pentagon is holding the line by choice, and no legislature has made that choice binding.
///
MEANWHILE, IN GOVERNMENT
The machines got hands and guns. The biggest question in Washington this week was who should write the rules: Congress or the states.
Washington and the states each want to hold the pen on AI.
The biggest thing government did on technology this week had nothing to do with robots. It was a question of jurisdiction. As of July 1, roughly 109 state AI laws are on the books, and state legislatures introduced more than 1,700 AI bills in the last six months alone. Washington wants one national rulebook instead. The standing backdrop is Executive Order 14409, signed June 2, which lets the federal government preview "covered frontier models" for up to 30 days before release, and which says in Section 3(c) that it is not a licensing regime. The newer move is legislative: a bipartisan discussion draft called the Great American AI Act (GAIA), from Reps. Jay Obernolte and Lori Trahan, would set federal transparency and catastrophic-risk standards for advanced AI models and pair them with a narrow, model-level preemption of state law.
Backers say a single federal standard prevents a fifty-state patchwork that, in industry's words, no developer can build fifty versions of a model to satisfy. Opponents, in both parties, argue a federal floor should not become a ceiling that stops states from protecting their own residents, and several statehouses have passed resolutions against a federal override. Rep. Obernolte pressed the case for a narrow, model-level preemption at a June 30 hearing. Citing a witness, he noted the country "can't have one capital setting the standards for all fifty states," and argued that frontier models, which cannot be built in separate versions for each state, are interstate by nature and belong under federal authority.
The forward question this newsletter keeps asking: can Washington actually preempt fifty legislatures, and if it cannot move fast enough, will the states keep legislating around it? This is the beginning of that debate, not the end.
Rep. Jay Obernolte (R-CA) · U.S. House Energy & Commerce, Jun 30, 2026
///
THE HEAT MAP
Who's moving, who's waiting. This week: who is moving to restrict Chinese and adversary robots and drones.
| AK | ME | |||||||||
| WA | ID | MT | ND | MN | IL | WI | MI | NY | VT | NH |
| OR | NV | WY | SD | IA | IN | OH | PA | NJ | RI | MA |
| CA | UT | CO | NE | MO | KY | WV | VA | MD | CT | |
| AZ | NM | KS | AR | TN | NC | SC | DC | DE | ||
| OK | LA | MS | AL | GA | ||||||
| HI | TX | FL |
COLOR KEY restricting · rolling back · bills pending · nothing / no mention
- Restricting (enacted): Florida, New Hampshire, and Tennessee have acted. Florida's statewide restriction forced police and fire agencies to ground more than 200 million dollars of mostly Chinese-made drones; New Hampshire signed a law in May 2026 barring state agencies from buying drones that fail federal defense rules or appear on the FCC covered list; and Tennessee's Procurement Protection Act, effective July 1, 2026, bars state and local contracts with companies domiciled in foreign-adversary countries. The real national lever is federal: after a 2025 review deadline passed, the FCC moved to block new Chinese-made drones from the U.S. market, and the proposed GUARD Act would extend that same Covered List mechanism to humanoid and quadruped robots.
- Bills pending: more states have introduced restrictions on foreign or Chinese-made drones and unmanned systems in recent sessions, including Michigan, North Carolina, New Jersey, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. Most target state-agency purchasing, not private ownership.
- Nothing / no mention: most states have no measure specific to adversary robotics on the table yet, and with most legislatures now adjourned for 2026, little is likely to move until sessions resume. The technology is moving faster than the calendar.
- Note: Washington, D.C. and the federal government are not scored on this state map; the federal action is covered above. State classifications reflect USLege data and public reporting and are directional.
///
THE BIG QUESTION
Here is the question this issue leaves you with. Should one Washington set the AI rules for all fifty states, or should each statehouse keep its own pen? And if the federal government wins that fight and the technology later harms you, who do you call: your member of Congress, or your state representative down the road? There is a real trade between one clear national standard and fifty local ones. Which do you want?
///
WHO'S WRITING
| Laura Luise Davis, Capitol insider to tech founder. |
I'm a lobbyist turned founder turned coder. I know a lot of lobbyists. And legislators. And agency leaders. They're my customers. Now I spend hours every day inside AI, sharing what I'm realizing and what government is and isn't regulating. This is not a how-to. It's a warning about what's coming.
WHO IT'S FOR
Tech: Cool. DM me if you need help.
Gov: You need to learn what's happening in tech.
Lobby: You're really going to want to read this.
Send this to someone. Know a founder about to get blindsided by a state law, or a policy person who'd rather see it coming? Forward this. SESSION grows by word of mouth.
Are you in tech and want to be on my podcast, Bills & Business? Reach out to me: [email protected].
WEBSITE · LINKEDIN · PODCAST · SPEAKING · DEMO
FOLLOW X · LINKEDIN · INSTAGRAM · YOUTUBE · TIKTOK
Book a demo · Written by Laura Luise Davis, Co-Founder & CBO at USLege · lauraluisedavis.com · AUSTIN · DC
SOURCES: GUARD Act HR 9129 and American Security Robotics Act S 4235 (congress.gov); EO 14409 (whitehouse.gov); FY2027 NDAA HR 8800 (congress.gov); Great American AI Act / GAIA discussion draft (Reps. Obernolte and Trahan); USLege clips (above); 1X NEO hand (Interesting Engineering, Jul 9 2026); Unitree armed robot dogs (Forbes, TechCrunch); Ukraine autonomous terminal guidance (Kyiv Post, EUobserver); FCC Chinese-drone action (CNN, Washington Post); state AI counts (TechPolicy.Press). Heat map: data via USLege and public reporting; state classification directional and editorial.