An artificial intelligence provision in the House version of the Republican tax cuts and spending legislation is dividing the party as it works to get the sweeping bill to President Donald Trump‘s desk.

The House passed the reconciliation legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, last month in a party-line vote. However, an AI provision gained some outsize attention after Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced she was unaware of the provision and would have voted against the bill if she had been.

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The provision would ban states and localities from imposing regulations on AI for the next decade. Some state lawmakers were upset about its inclusion, sparking disagreement between Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate.

Some Republicans have emphasized the importance of federalism and have pushed back on the federal government curtailing such regulations. However, others have argued that such a patchwork regulation network could make innovation difficult.

“I’m all for federalism and allowing states to be experimental here — AI is a really complex issue,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said Tuesday on Capitol Hill, later saying he doesn’t think the reconciliation bill should restrict states’ rights to regulate AI.

“I just don’t have faith in the federal government or our ability to write laws here,” Johnson added.

Rep. Mike Flood (R-NE), a member of the House Financial Services Committee, told the Washington Examiner that he thinks there is a case to be made that AI regulation is the authority of the federal government because there needs to be a standard that applies across state lines.

“The states certainly have a role — and I was in the legislature for 10 years — but I liken this to privacy, where even state-regulated insurance companies are like, please give us a federal standard,” Flood said. “So I think the provision has merit, reasonable people can disagree, but I don’t have any issues with it.”

Greene was one of the first to draw attention to the provision.

She said on X that she didn’t read that part of the House bill and pushed for the Senate to nix it now that the House has passed the legislation on to the Senate for tweaking.

“I am adamantly OPPOSED to this and it is a violation of state rights and I would have voted NO if I had known this was in there,” she said. “We have no idea what AI will be capable of in the next 10 years and giving it free rein and tying states hands is potentially dangerous.”

It is an open question whether the AI provision in the House legislation would even be allowed, given the Senate parliamentarian has to rule that it complies with the Byrd Rule, which requires reconciliation to focus solely on fiscal matters and allows a senator to raise a point of order if they believe there is “extraneous matter” in the bill.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) led the charge to revise the language on the Senate side to comply with the rule. The new language proposes that states would be denied federal funding for broadband projects if they regulate AI.

“These provisions fulfill the mandate given to President Trump and Congressional Republicans by the voters: to unleash America’s full economic potential and keep her safe from enemies,” Cruz said in a statement.

Cruz said he would make the case to the Senate parliamentarian about why the language should stay in, according to the Associated Press.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), a fiscal hawk with a libertarian streak, told reporters on Tuesday that lawmakers who oppose the move to federalize AI regulation might have to swallow the provision.

“I doubt it’s gonna change,” he said. “Maybe there are enough people that they would change it, but the only way I think they change anything is if you say, ‘I’m not voting for the bill, if it’s in it.’ … But no, I don’t like — in a usual fashion — I don’t like the federal government telling states they can or cannot do anything.”

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Still, many lawmakers are either not closely tracking the matter, see both sides of the argument, or are waiting to learn more about the matter.

“I’m still listening to the arguments on both sides,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) told the Washington Examiner.