Defending the American Freedom to Innovate in the Digital Age
Two hundred and fifty years ago, Benjamin Franklin helped craft the constitutional framework that would make America the world’s innovation leader. As the Constitutional Convention debated how the new nation should encourage progress, Franklin’s unique perspective as an inventor and a statesman allowed him to articulate how government policy could either foster or stifle innovation. Franklin’s perspective was shaped by hard-won experience, as he had witnessed firsthand how state-by-state trade barriers were strangling American commerce under the Articles of Confederation. His practical wisdom helped shape the Commerce Clause, which grants Congress the power to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States.”
As a successful businessman and inventor, Franklin understood that innovation requires the free flow of ideas, goods, and talent across boundaries. The patchwork of conflicting state regulations under the Articles had created exactly the kind of fragmented marketplace that stifles entrepreneurship. Franklin embodied the American spirit of innovation—a national characteristic later observed by Alexis de Tocqueville as a preference for applied science over pure theory, which he attributed to the country’s democratic form of governance. Franklin and the founders had designed a system in which progress emerged not from government decree or academic speculation, but from individuals free to operate in a unified national market for innovation.
Franklin chose not to patent his innovations, believing that knowledge should spread freely to benefit all humanity. “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others,” he wrote, “we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours.” But his greater contribution was helping create a unified economic framework in which such innovations could flourish. The Commerce Clause ensured that an inventor in Pennsylvania wouldn’t face different rules in Virginia, Maryland, and New York—the kind of regulatory fragmentation that had paralyzed American business under the Articles of Confederation.
Today, that founding vision faces unprecedented threats. State-by-state artificial intelligence (AI) regulation threatens to recreate the exact fragmentation that Franklin and the founders sought to eliminate. When New York requires one approach to AI governance, Texas demands another, and California imposes a third, we return to the dysfunctional patchwork that brought American commerce to its knees in the 1780s. This harms new players in the AI landscape, as complex compliance requirements favor large incumbents with armies of lawyers over garage inventors with breakthrough ideas. This is exactly the opposite from the unified, innovation-friendly market the Commerce Clause was designed to create.
Franklin understood that innovation required the freedom to experiment across a unified market. Although his constitutional framework didn’t guarantee success, it ensured that entrepreneurs wouldn’t be strangled by conflicting state regulations before their ideas could take root. Modern AI governance threatens to eliminate this competitive laboratory, demanding that innovators navigate 50 different regulatory schemes instead of focusing on the task of innovation.
The stakes today mirror those Franklin faced in 1787. Just as the Articles of Confederation’s fragmented approach had created economic chaos, today’s patchwork of state AI laws risks ceding American technological leadership to nations with more unified approaches. The choice is not one between safety and innovation; instead, we choose between a coherent national framework that enables responsible innovation and a return to the regulatory balkanization that the founders explicitly rejected.
R Street believes, as Franklin did, that progress emerges from freedom, not control. Real solutions to legitimate concerns about AI safety will come from innovators free to experiment, iterate, and improve—not from bureaucrats prescribing theoretical solutions to practical problems.
Franklin’s legacy reminds us that America’s technological dominance springs from a simple principle: Trust Americans to innovate and solve problems. When we abandon that trust in favor of precautionary prohibition, we abandon the very innovation culture that built our prosperity.
As Franklin knew when he helped design our constitutional framework for commerce, unified markets drive innovation while fragmented ones strangle it. The risk of allowing state-by-state tech regulation to recreate the dysfunction of the Articles of Confederation far outweighs the theoretical benefits of letting each state experiment with its own approach. The founders built America’s constitutional framework precisely to enable the next Benjamin Franklin to emerge in a unified national market. That framework and that opportunity must be safeguarded for future generations.