Evidence from 2025 shows that the dynamic Sacks described has clearly materialized, even though Congress has not yet enacted a comprehensive AI law:

• White House support for preempting state AI laws. President Trump’s signature budget reconciliation package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (H.R. 1), originated from the White House and was framed as his core second‑term agenda. The House‑passed version explicitly contained a 10‑year moratorium on “state‑level enforcement of any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence (AI),” i.e., a federal preemption of state AI rules built into Trump’s megabill.(en.wikipedia.org) Separately, reporting shows Trump personally asked Congress to add a provision blocking state AI laws to the National Defense Authorization Act, with plans to sue and defund states that passed such laws.(reuters.com) A leaked draft executive order, “Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National AI Policy,” would direct DOJ to challenge state AI statutes and declares the administration’s goal of a “minimally burdensome national standard — not 50 discordant state ones,” further confirming White House backing for a single, nationally determined AI regime.(arstechnica.com)

• Growing Republican legislative backing. The 10‑year moratorium was written by House Republicans into Trump’s flagship reconciliation bill and passed the House on a near‑party‑line vote, meaning a large share of GOP representatives voted to strip states of AI‑regulatory authority.(en.wikipedia.org) Coverage of the provision describes Republicans as arguing it is needed to avoid a “patchwork” of state rules and to give Congress time to pass a comprehensive federal AI framework — precisely the “single national standard” rationale Sacks anticipated.(notus.org) In the Senate, Republican leadership initially advanced versions tying federal AI funds to states refraining from AI regulation, and only later, after major backlash from state officials of both parties, did the Senate vote 99–1 to strip the AI‑preemption language from Trump’s megabill.(reuters.com) That sequence (House passage, then partial Republican retreat in the Senate) shows that substantial numbers of GOP lawmakers did in fact get “on board” with preemptive federal AI legislation before political costs forced a climb‑down.

• National‑standard framing vs. actual law on the books. Reuters and other outlets note that tech firms like OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Andreessen Horowitz have been pressing for national AI standards to replace state rules, and that Trump’s efforts to block state laws through the budget bill and NDAA align with that push — even though, as of late November 2025, Congress still has not enacted an overarching federal AI regulatory framework.(reuters.com) Instead, the White House and allied Republicans have repeatedly tried to (a) stop states from regulating AI and (b) position federal authority as the locus of future AI rules, which matches Sacks’s substance: preempting blue‑state AI regulation in favor of a single, federally controlled standard.

Because Sacks’s prediction was about who would support what kind of policy (White House + an expanding bloc of Republicans backing federal preemption and a unified national approach), not about the ultimate success of those bills, the core elements he forecast have already occurred. The specific preemption provisions have been beaten back so far, and no comprehensive national AI statute exists yet, but his political prediction about Trump’s administration and Republican legislators lining up behind federal preemption of state AI rules is borne out by the 2025 record.