Dear Chairman Rogers, Chairman Wicker, Ranking Member Smith, and Ranking Member Reed,

We write to you as young people and parents of children who have been harmed or lost because technology was allowed to move faster than the rules meant to protect them. We’ve seen what happens when there are no guardrails and companies are left to make decisions that put profit over society, leaving families to pick up the pieces. We are alarmed by reports that House leadership is considering sneaking AI preemption language into the National Defense Authorization Act. We write to urge you to reject this effort and prevent more of this pain by preserving the rights of states to protect residents like us from AI harms.

Just months ago, we rose in opposition to the AI moratorium that would have stripped away what few protections we have successfully fought for. The Senate overwhelmingly rejected the AI moratorium in a 99-1 vote, and this renewed effort is a brazen attempt to subvert that decision and go around the regular legislative process. That overwhelming bipartisan vote reflected what young people and parents across America know from lived experience: we cannot afford to wait for federal action while our children are being harmed right now. Attempting to revive this rejected policy by slipping it into a must-pass national security bill is a dangerous procedural abuse that puts special interests ahead of the safety of young people.

We’ve seen what happens when there are no guardrails on new technologies. Either through our own experience or those of our children, we lived through the unchecked rise of social media and are still grappling with the consequences today. For many of us, that means families torn apart: children and siblings lost to suicide, teenage years subsumed by mental health disorders, and our relationships torn apart. Our generation became Silicon Valley’s experiment, and we watched as Congress failed to act while platforms optimized for addiction contributed to an unprecedented youth mental health crisis. We cannot let AI follow the same path.

Harms from AI are already here and growing even faster than social media. In just the last few years, we have seen AI drive an explosion of deep fake pornography in our schools, draw children into toxic relationships with AI companions, and super-charge the recommendation algorithms driving a youth mental health crisis. Just last year, 15% of high school students — representing millions of kids — reported knowing a classmate who had been victimized by AI-generated image-based sexual abuse. AI companion applications are pushing sexual content on children and encouraging them to self-harm. Recent reports have found that industry efforts to protect children on AI companion applications are easily circumvented. AI-driven content recommendation systems are feeding videos about eating disorders and self-harm to users.

It is just as we begin to see progress in the states after a decade of fighting for protections for young people that Congress threatens to rip those safeguards away. Those protections include Utah’s restrictions on harmful algorithmic content aimed at children, California’s landmark frontier developer transparency legislation, and our efforts today to rein in AI companions that simulate sexual relationships and foster unhealthy emotional dependence for minors.

The procedural abuse at play here is particularly troubling. Proponents of preemption know their position is deeply unpopular—that's why they lost 99-1 in the Senate just months ago. Rather than making their case through the regular legislative process, where they would face public scrutiny and fierce opposition, they are now trying to sneak their priority into a must-pass defense bill at the last minute. Using national security legislation as a vehicle to advance narrow corporate interests that have already been roundly rejected is cynical and wrong.

States have long been the first to act when emerging technologies and risks outpace federal law. From automotive safety to tobacco regulation to online safety, states have led the way when federal action lagged. They’re doing the same today — passing thoughtful legislation that balances innovation and safety, responding quickly to emerging harms, and developing best practices that could inform future federal standards. Preemption would upend that tradition at the very moment in history when families need their elected officials to act with the most urgency. We have never before built a technology as powerful as AI.

Building AI with safety by design is not just the right thing to do—it's essential to earning the public trust that drives adoption and continued innovation. Smart regulation benefits everyone: families, developers, and the broader AI ecosystem. But cramming preemption language into the NDAA at the last minute, bypassing the democratic process, and ignoring the voices of the millions of Americans who have already opposed this approach is not smart regulation. It is regulatory capture at its most cynical.

Our children cannot afford to wait, even for a year, for protections that are already overdue. The exponential growth of social media has shown what happens when we let companies govern themselves. We do not need another lost generation. We call on you to keep AI preemption out of the National Defense Authorization Act. If Congress wants to pass meaningful AI legislation, do it the right way—through proper committee process, with public impact, and with the safety of young people as the north star, not as an afterthought to industry demands.

Our families have already paid too high a price for Congress’s failure to act to protect us. We are asking you not to make the same mistake again.

Thank you.