This week, country music icon Martina McBride poured her heart out before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. Her testimony in support of the bipartisan NO FAKES Act was raw, earnest, and courageous. Speaking as an artist, a mother, and a citizen, she described the emotional weight of having her voice—one that has offered solace and strength to survivors of domestic violence—exploited by AI systems to peddle messages she would never endorse. Her words echoed through the chamber with moral clarity: “Give me the tools to stop that kind of betrayal.”

The NO FAKES Act aims to create a federal property right over an individual’s name, image, and likeness (NIL), offering victims of AI-generated deepfakes a meaningful path to justice. The bill has drawn bipartisan support and commendation from artists’ rights advocates, child protection organizations, and even some technology companies. It represents a sincere attempt to preserve human dignity in the age of machine mimicry.

And yet, while McBride testified in defense of authenticity and integrity, Congress was quietly advancing legislation that was the opposite.

At the same time her testimony was being heard, lawmakers were moving forward with a massive federal budget package ironically called the “Big Beautiful Bill” that includes an AI safe harbor moratorium—a sweeping provision that would strip states of their ability to enforce NIL protections against AI through existing state laws. The so-called “AI Safe Harbor” effectively immunizes AI developers from accountability under most current state-level right-of-publicity and privacy laws, not to mention wire fraud, wrongful death and RICO. It does so in the name of “innovation,” but at the cost of silencing local democratic safeguards and creators of all categories.

Worse yet, the economic scoring of the “Big Beautiful Bill” is based on economic assumptions that rely on productivity gains from AI ripping off all creators from grandma’s baby pictures to rock stars.

The irony is devastating. Martina McBride’s call for justice was sincere and impassioned. But the AI moratorium hanging over the very same legislative session would make it harder—perhaps impossible—for states like Florida, Tennessee, Texas, or California to shield their citizens from the very abuses McBride described. The same Congress that applauded her courage is in the process of handing Silicon Valley a blank check to continue the vulpine lust of its voracious scraping and synthetic exploitation of human expression.

This is not just hypocrisy; it’s the personification of Washington’s two-faced AI policy. On one hand, ceremonial hearings and soaring rhetoric. On the other, buried provisions that serve the interests of the most powerful AI platforms in the world. Oh, and the AI platforms also wrote themselves into the pork fest for $500,000,000 of taxpayers money (more likely debt) for “AI modernization” whatever that is. At a time that the bond market is about to dump all over the U.S. economy. Just another day in the Imperial City.

Let’s be honest: the AI safe harbor moratorium isn’t about protecting innovation. It’s about protecting industrialized theft. It codifies a grotesque and morbid fascination with digital kleptomania—a fetish for the unearned, the repackaged, the replicated.

In that sense, the AI Safe Harbor doesn’t just threaten artists. It perfectly embodies the twisted ethos of modern Silicon Valley, a worldview most grotesquely illustrated by the image of a drooling Sam Altman—the would-be godfather of generative AI—salivating over the limitless data he believes he has a divine right to mine.

Martina McBride called for justice. Congress listened politely. And then gave her to the wolves.

They have a chance to make it right—starting with stripping the radical and extreme safe harbor from the “Big Beautiful Bill.”

[This post first appeared on MusicTechPolicy]