The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) is back. Again. For the third Congress in a row, its sponsors have reintroduced the same legislation with the same problems, hoping that persistence will somehow cure what substantive failure repeatedly hasn’t. It won’t.
After half a decade of neo-Brandisian advocacy, AICOA’s only legislative accomplishment is that it was rushed through the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2022 with limited debate and virtually no scrutiny of its significant drafting problems. The bill rightly never made it to the Senate floor. When it was reintroduced in the 118th Congress, and then again in the 119th, even fewer senators were willing to support it. The pattern is clear: the more colleagues actually examine AICOA, the less they like it.
The bill’s core flaw is that it imposes sweeping government-managed liability on how digital platforms integrate their own services—rules that are so vague that even supporters can’t define their outer limits. Under AICOA, a company could face legal exposure for showing its own Maps results in its own search engine, or for offering its own products in its own marketplace. Consumers benefit from these integrations every day. The bill doesn’t protect them—it protects competitors from having to compete, and punishes companies for building things consumers actually want.
AICOA was conceived during a specific moment of Washington groupthink: the 2020 House Judiciary antitrust report, which argued that tech markets were static, dominated by entrenched monopolists facing no genuine competitive pressure. That assumption was weak at the time. Today, it has been completely shattered by AI.
Over the past several years, generative AI has reordered the entire technology industry. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have disrupted sectors once described as uncontestable. Search—the market AICOA’s architects treated as a permanent monopoly—is now one of the most fiercely contested spaces in tech, with millions of users migrating to AI-native tools. ChatGPT, released in 2022, shot OpenAI’s valuation to $300 billion. The competitive dynamism AICOA’s drafters claimed was absent is playing out everywhere, in real time.
The bill accounts for none of this. AICOA’s definitions, prohibitions, and liability triggers were drafted for a static 2020 snapshot of the internet. Applied to the AI era, the bill would create massive legal uncertainty around exactly the AI-integrated features that are now the core of digital competition. There is no clear answer to how AICOA would treat an AI assistant built into a search engine, or an AI-generated product recommendation on a marketplace—and that ambiguity alone is enough to chill investment.
Policymakers cannot expect to foster a thriving, competitive AI landscape while shackling the industry with regulatory frameworks designed for an obsolete digital past. Congress should prioritize the flexibility that empowers American innovation to compete globally. AICOA proposes direct impediments to the very dynamism that will define the next decade of technology.