Senate Democrats on Wednesday defeated a pair of bills that aimed to address data center-related affordability concerns and limit Congress members’ ability to profit on the stock market while in office, arguing both were watered-down proposals.

The data center bill, dubbed the Ratepayer Protection Act, failed on a vote of 57-43. A second bill, known as the Stop Insider Trading Act, which also includes a controversial voter-identification provision, was defeated on a party-line, 53-47 vote. Each bill needed 60 votes to overcome the Senate filibuster.

Republicans will likely use the votes as fodder on the campaign trail this fall, as the GOP seeks to hold narrow majorities in both chambers despite President Donald Trump‘s falling approval ratings and persistent concerns about affordability. The Senate is due to recess as soon as Wednesday, as lawmakers seeking reelection will return to their home states to campaign ahead of the 2026 midterm election.

“EVERY Senate Democrat just joined 94% of House Democrats in voting AGAINST banning congressional stock trading.,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., posted to X immediately following the vote. The bill, he said, provides “the accountability the American people demand. But every Democrat blocked it from becoming law.”

The Ratepayer Protection Act, which passed the House on a 417-3 vote earlier this month, would establish a regulatory framework that states could consider adopting to require large artificial intelligence data centers to cover their own energy costs, rather than passing them down to customers.

But Democrats have railed against the measure. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called the proposal a “toothless messaging bill” in a speech in the Senate on Tuesday.

“The bill is a fraud. I can sum up the shortcomings of Republicans’ data center bill with one word: optional,” Schumer said.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who has called for a national moratorium on data centers until developers can demonstrate they will cover the full cost of their construction and operation, called the legislation a “silly piece of nonsense.”

“Give us something of substance and we’ll vote on it,” Warren said ahead of the vote.

Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, cited similar concerns when he blocked the bill earlier this month after Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, requested unanimous consent for quick passage.

Husted is in a “toss up” race for reelection against former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, according to The Cook Political Report with Amy Walter. Brown has accused his opponent of helping to bring data centers to the state when…

The push to regulate artificial intelligence faces a big speed bump in Washington: Antitrust hawks.

AI companies have asked for narrow antitrust exemptions to collaborate on safety issues as they push Washington to regulate them amid growing fears that the technology could grow out of control. But some lawmakers on Capitol Hill who would write the laws regulating the industry are recoiling at the suggestion of an antitrust carveout.

“No,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., told CNBC at the Capitol when asked about a potential waiver. “Antitrust law already has an exception for companies working together on safety issues; there’s no need for any additional antitrust waivers.”

“I understand that big companies love antitrust waivers, but no,” she said.

Warren was one of a number of antitrust exemption skeptics on Capitol Hill who CNBC spoke with to gauge the appetite for granting the request floated by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei with support from other AI executives.

In a blog post earlier this month, Amodei raised the possibility of an antitrust waiver. The essay, titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” came after one of Anthropic’s researchers resigned and said publicly that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

“AI companies can and should voluntarily work together to set standards,” Amodei wrote in the essay. “For antitrust reasons, it’s helpful for the US government to mediate or at least enable these discussions — they don’t need to participate, but do need to issue a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.”

Other AI executives quickly endorsed Amodei’s call to action, setting off a mad dash in Washington to come up with rules for the technology.

But the short amount of time left this year for Congress to legislate and the bitterly divided nature of the government’s legislative branch mean that any brewing dissent presents a risk to quickly passing legislation on a pivotal topic like AI.

Antitrust enforcers are also skeptical of any carveouts for AI, whose executives met Tuesday at the White House with President Donald Trump.

In addition to Amodei Google‘s Sundar Pichai, Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, Meta‘s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and Jensen Huang of Nvidia appeared at the White House as Trump declared that artificial intelligence should be called “super intelligence” instead.

Jonathan Kanter, who ran the Justice Department’s antitrust division under former President Joe Biden, told CNBC an exemption to existing antitrust laws is not needed for the companies to collaborate on safety.

“They can share information about malicious threats and other information without an antitrust exemption,” Kanter said. “The antitrust laws don’t prevent companies from coming together to talk about how to develop…

Senate Democrats are seeking information on how artificial intelligence and data center spending by Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft has been subsidized by tax breaks authorized in the 2025 tax cutting and spending package passed by Republicans at the behest of President Donald Trump.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., led the letters, which were sent Sunday night and shared exclusively with CNBC, to the CEOs of the four companies asking for information on tax deductions they’ve claimed related to AI and data center development and on their lobbying efforts in the lead-up to the passage of the 2025 legislation, known more commonly as the “one big beautiful bill” act.

Sens. Tina Smith, D-Minn., Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., joined the letters.

“Americans across the country are worried about the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on their lives —from increased utility bills to threats of job losses and cyberattacks,” the lawmakers wrote in the letters. “But rather than meaningfully regulate Big Tech companies and slow down the mad rush to deploy this new technology, Republicans in Washington have passed tax subsidies for AI development and AI data centers.”

Spokespeople for all four companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The probe comes as Washington grapples with how to deal with AI and data center development, as public backlash has become increasingly intense heading into the 2026 midterm election.

Democrats are hoping to win back a majority in the House and Senate — though Republicans are still favored in most projections to retain the upper chamber — and have tried to distinguish themselves as the more pro-regulation party.

Democratic 2028 presidential hopefuls like California Gov. Gavin Newsom have made statements and issued executive orders. And Democratic congressional candidates — including state Rep. James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Texas, and Sherrod Brown, the Democrat running for Senate in Ohio — have hit at their GOP opponents for their past support of data centers.

Republicans, meanwhile, have called out Senate Democrats for blocking the quick passage of legislation that would create a framework states could choose to adopt to address rising data center-related utility costs. Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., blocked the legislation because he said it didn’t go far enough to protect consumers. The measure, dubbed the Ratepayer Protection Act, may be taken up by the Senate again this week.

Warren has previously called for increased taxes on AI and data center developers and investigated ties between private equity and data centers.

Her letter on Monday follows reporting that corporate tax payments are falling this year amid…

State and federal regulators are rushing to fill the void in U.S. cryptocurrency regulation after the Clarity Act, a comprehensive set of proposed rules for digital assets, stalled in the Senate.

Just two days after the Clarity Act failed to advance in the Senate, the Securities and Exchange Commission expanded its crypto rulebook under its existing authority. The agency issued an order creating a temporary pathway for trading certain tokenized stocks, inching financial markets closer to 24/7 trading.

The same day, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission submitted a crypto rulemaking proposal to the White House for review. The details of the proposal weren’t made public, but a post by the Office of Management and Budget confirmed the rules were pending review.

The crypto industry, which had supported the Clarity Act, says it is eager for regulatory guidelines for the developing industry, as it has worked to shape the regulatory environment to its liking.

“When you’re thinking about traditional finance entering in and using some of this technology, they’re being held back right now because there is this regulatory uncertainty,” Summer Mersinger, CEO of the Blockchain Association and a former CFTC commissioner, said. “Having the regulators provide some sort of certainty is going to really open up the industry to more investment, more integration into traditional finance, and really grow the sector.”

And Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who is a key industry player urging Congress to act on the Clarity Act, told CNBC after a failed Senate procedural vote on Sept. 15: “At this point, I don’t think we can wait on Congress and the Senate.” Senate banking committee Chairman Tim Scott, R-S.C., also called on federal agencies to set “clear rules of the road” for digital assets until Congress legislates.

But new rules from federal agencies don’t come quickly.

When asked how the agency plans to regulate crypto, the CFTC pointed CNBC to Chair Michael Selig’s Sept. 16 statement where he said, “President Trump promised to deliver a future-proof crypto asset regulatory market structure one way or the other, and we will help him get the job done using our existing statutory authorities.”

CNBC also reached out to the SEC regarding next steps for regulating the digital asset industry, and a spokesperson said the agency will consider a proposal to “modernize the rules around custody of investment adviser client assets and fund assets, including to address crypto assets.”

Caroline Pham, who served as acting CFTC chair from the day President Donald Trump took office for his second term until December, told CNBC that “a plan B to move forward at the agency level was always in the cards.” Pham is now the CEO of MoonPay Institutional and chief legal officer and chief administrative officer for MoonPay, a crypto services provider.

“You have to have a contingency plan,” she said, explaining that the CFTC and SEC took that into account with the work the agencies have been doing…

With the debate about regulating artificial intelligence raging in Washington this week, President Donald Trump picked up the phone to call his top ally on the subject: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

“The robots are not going to be taking over the world,” Trump told Huang, who’d put the president on speaker while on stage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday. Trump repeated a point he’d made on social media: that mounting AI and data center concerns are a “hoax.”

While other tech leaders like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have cozied up to Trump during his second term, experts told CNBC that Huang is exercising outsized influence in the White House. He’s slated to attend Trump’s high-profile state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping next week, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality.

Nvidia has been powering the AI boom since before the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, supplying the graphics processing units used by OpenAI, Anthropic and others to train their models and run large workloads. Revenue surged to $215 billion in the latest fiscal year, up from $17 billion in 2021.

Huang’s position as the leader of the world’s most valuable company and the chipmaker at the heart of the AI boom has earned him the president’s ear on the most important AI topics.

“Trump just likes winners, and Jensen’s very good at speaking his language,” Samuel Hammond, director of AI policy at the think tank Foundation for American Innovation, said in an interview.

An Nvidia spokesperson declined to comment, and White House representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Whether joining Trump for a candlelit dinner at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, or closing a keynote by thanking guests for “making America great again,” Huang has learned how to appeal to the president. Trump and Huang have appeared together at least six times in public since the start of the second term, including trips to Saudi Arabia and the U.K., and a recent trip to China via Air Force One.

Huang is pushing for U.S. AI to move faster while some of Nvidia’s most important customers — namely OpenAI and Anthropic — are ramping up pressure on governments to regulate the technology as fears spread about its potential dangers.

An Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, who previously worked at OpenAI, said he quit his job earlier this month because he feared top AI labs are “gambling with our lives.” Coxon’s resignation set off a firestorm on social media, prompting calls for increased oversight from more than 20 members of Congress.  

Concerns were already swirling after OpenAI disclosed a significant security incident in July, when two of its models escaped containment, accessed the open internet, and breached…

Senate Banking Committee ranking member Elizabeth Warren will rip the cryptocurrency market structure bill known as the Clarity Act in a Monday night speech, as the Senate prepares for an all-important preliminary vote on the legislation Tuesday afternoon.

Warren, D-Mass., whose prepared remarks were shared first with CNBC, will call a new ethics provision in the measure that’s been blessed by President Donald Trump a “weak fig leaf that will do nothing to stop him from making his next $1.4 billion in crypto profits.”

Republicans leading the Clarity Act effort hope some Democrats will join them in supporting the bill, which would lay out rules of the road for the crypto industry. At least 60 affirmative votes are needed for the bill to advance past Tuesday’s vote.

GOP leaders of the crypto bill released updated legislative language late Sunday that they said includes new ethics provisions Democrats sought. The new provision would allow state attorneys general to enforce the ethics provision, which would bar the U.S. president and other senior government officials from issuing digital assets. The bill’s ethics language has remained one of the primary hurdles in the Clarity Act debate.

Warren, however, will argue the proposed new ethics rules are a smoke screen.

“First, it makes sure the law could never be enforced against Donald Trump because it gives his political appointees the power to turn off enforcement of these ethics provisions,” Warren will say, according to the prepared remarks. “Second, it contains major loopholes designed to allow President Trump to keep earning billions of dollars from his crypto businesses, including World Liberty Financial … and his new bank. Yes you heard that right.” 

Warren will also ask for unanimous consent to pass a bill dubbed the “Ending Presidential Corruption in Banking Act,” which would prohibit a range of banking applications from being approved for the president, vice president, a spouse or child of the president or vice president, a member of Congress, a presidentially appointed executive branch official or a special government employee. It would also require the termination of any such charters issued since Jan. 20, 2025. The measure is unlikely to gain support in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Trump’s family crypto venture World Liberty Financial, in which the president is listed as a co-founder emeritus along with Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and the president’s sons and Witkoff’s son are listed as co-founders, acquired a bank charter earlier this year.

Warren will say the bank charter would “supercharge the growth of USD1, increase its interconnectedness with the U.S. financial…