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The Florida House of Representatives rejected considering two key priorities of Governor Ron DeSantis at the beginning of a special session held on Tuesday: new regulations for artificial intelligence and relaxing vaccination requirements for K-12 students.
But according to the report from Local 10, both proposals collided with the Speaker of the House, Republican Daniel Pérez, who informed members that he would not promote any legislation on those topics.
Pérez, the third Cuban-American to be appointed to lead the state House, was straightforward upon leaving the assembly: "I am confident that this body's position of not advancing on any of those issues was the right one," he said, as quoted by Telemundo 51.
The special session was called by DeSantis on April 15 primarily to redraw Florida's congressional districts, but the governor took the opportunity to also include those two proposals, which had already failed during the regular legislative session.
What do the unapproved bills by DeSantis consist of?
The first is the so-called "Bill of Rights" for AI.
The document prohibits minors from opening accounts on company chatbot platforms without parental consent and requires those platforms to remind users that they are conversing with a machine and not a person. Additionally, it empowers parents to monitor how their children use these tools.
On the other hand, it prevents companies from disclosing users' personal information and bans the provision of therapy services through artificial intelligence.
DeSantis argues that the use of AI should be regulated because there are risks to children, but Daniel Pérez claims that such regulation falls under the federal government's jurisdiction.
"I understand the administrator's concerns about wanting to protect children. But we have clearly understood that the president of the United States issued an executive order indicating that the federal government should take charge of AI policies in this country," he claimed.
Mandatory vaccines, yes or no?
The other banned project was "medical freedom," which created a new exemption category called "conscience." This would allow parents to exempt their children from the vaccinations currently required to enter the K-12 school system, such as those that combat polio, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, measles, mumps, and rubella.
All of this aligns with the changes to the school vaccination regulations that DeSantis advocated for last September.
The regulation also protects the population from mandatory vaccinations in the event of a health emergency.
DeSantis has said that during the pandemic he took measures to protect Floridians from "mandates," but that his measures were temporary. "We need to make it permanent because, when I'm not here, you must be protected against this if it comes back."
For his part, Daniel Pérez questions the presence of students in schools without vaccinations against diseases like measles and chickenpox, "which have been addressed for decades." "That was something I wasn't comfortable with," he stated.
The health context supports this caution: Florida recorded over 153 confirmed cases of measles in 2026, with an outbreak in Collier County, placing the state among the five with the most cases in the country. Vaccination rates among kindergarteners have dropped to 88-89%, below the 95% threshold needed for community immunity.
What happened after the stance of the House of Representatives?
After the decision of the Chamber, the Senate took a different stance on the two projects: it approved the "AI Bill of Rights," but chose not to move forward with the vaccine proposal, even though it had approved a similar version during the regular session last March.
DeSantis, for his part, responded sternly on the social media platform X: "Voters chose Republicans to protect freedom from both the cartel of large tech companies and the medical-industrial complex."
He also issued a direct warning to lawmakers: "It will be interesting to see these guys campaign as enthusiasts of big tech and guardians of the medical-industrial complex."
The special session is extended until May 1 and its main goal is to approve a new congressional district map that would give Republicans 24 of Florida's 28 congressional seats in the federal Congress, up from the current 20.
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