The Trump White House has a “really good template” for how lawmakers can write the “rules of the road” and create a national policy framework for AI, Build American AI’s executive director Nathan Leamer told Breitbart News during a recent policy event.

Leamer, who leads the group focused on advocating for American leadership in AI, spoke about the importance of a national policy framework and why it is necessary, explaining that lawmakers must look to the past when crafting policy for the future.

“The future of AI, [the] success of AI in America, depends on learning lessons from the past,” Leamer said during Breitbart News’s “Energy Dominance and AI” policy event in Washington, DC, which also featured Interior Secretary and Chairman of the National Energy Dominance Council Doug Burgum and Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA).

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The Build American AI chief used internet policy as a prime example.

“Inherently, internet policy is interstate. Because the value of the Commerce Clause, you can’t just have one state do one thing, another state do the other,” Leamer said, pointing to his background in the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) world.

“You can’t have different rules of the road. You need a Federal Communications Commission, right? You need internet policy at a national level – whether it’s the Communications Decency Act or Telecommunications Act from 1996,” he said, contending that these policies are necessary to lay out the “rules of the road.” Similarly, he said, America needs a national policy framework for AI to prevent an awkward patchwork of rules that change from state to state.

Nathan Leamer, Executive Director of Build American AI, speaks with Breitbart News Washington Bureau Chief Matthew Boyle at Breitbart News’s “Energy Dominance and AI” policy event in Washington, DC, on Monday, May 11, 2026. (Matthew Perdie/Breitbart News)

Such a patchy framework would lead to an avalanche of issues.

“You need these national policies to kind of like lay the rules of the road,” Leamer said, providing some examples. “In lieu of that, you have these states who are creating their own approaches. Colorado has their approach, which, by the way, is driving companies from Colorado. Right now, there’s people who can’t deal with the compliance costs and small AI startups, so they’ll flee that state,” he said. “California, in the same way — it’s also red states too — are tempted to pass laws that look good, but they also have these compliance costs that are actually driving up problems for small businesses and driving them away from certain states.”