Scale & Strategy
together with
This is Scale & Strategy, the hydraulic press of business newsletters (we pack everything you need to know into an easy daily read).
Here’s what we got for you today:
- AI regulation is turning into a full-contact sport
- Google drops Nano Banana Pro, its next-gen imaging model
AI regulation is turning into a full-contact sport
The AI policy landscape is getting messier by the hour.
The Trump Administration is reportedly weighing an executive order that would override state-level AI laws, using lawsuits and federal funding pressure to do it, according to several outlets on Wednesday.
Nothing is official yet, but if the order drops, Attorney General Pam Bondi would be tapped to build an “AI Litigation Task Force” aimed squarely at state regulations. The Department of Commerce would be told to draft guidelines that let the feds financially squeeze noncompliant states. FCC chair Brendan Carr and White House AI czar David Sacks would be tasked with figuring out whether federal disclosure rules should explicitly preempt state ones.
California’s SB 53, which set safety and transparency requirements for model developers, is already in the crosshairs. The draft order calls it “complex and burdensome,” which is putting it mildly by their standards.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. House Republican leadership is pushing to anchor similar federal preemption language in the National Defense Authorization Act, signaling a broader effort to strip states of regulatory authority on AI.
Still, it’s too early to forecast how much impact any of this will actually have. Model companies operate globally, not just across US jurisdictions, and federal-versus-state compliance is only one slice of their regulatory reality. As Cobun Zweifel-Keegan of the IAPP told The Deep View, the real fight is a constitutional one: federal authority vs. state authority.
Meanwhile, the uncertainty isn’t just American. The European Commission is moving to weaken parts of the GDPR and soften the EU AI Act, hinting at a broader deregulatory swing across Western markets, Andrew Gamino-Cheong of Trustible noted.
And the clock isn’t stopping. These models get more capable every quarter, and every regulatory draft risks becoming outdated the moment it’s written. Companies can self-regulate, but there’s no real incentive to slow down when the entire game is about building bigger, faster, and more powerful systems than the next lab over.
Vanta uses AI and automation to get you compliant fast, simplify your audit process, and unblock deals — so you can prove to customers that you take security seriously.
Make Vanta your compliance co-pilot and:
- Get SOC 2 ready without pulling engineers off product
- Automate evidence collection and streamline audit processes
- Unblock enterprise deals with security credibility that sales
- Access expert support at every stage, from startup to scale-up
Get compliant fast with Vanta – trusted by top startups like Cursor, Linear, and Replit.
Google drops Nano Banana Pro, its next-gen imaging model
Google just rolled out Nano Banana Pro, a new image model built on Gemini 3. It brings pro-grade editing, 4K image generation, sharper text rendering, and enough world knowledge to handle complex infographics and data-driven visuals.
The details:
• Pro can juggle up to 14 visual references at once and keep character identities consistent across groups of up to five people, which opens the door to more coherent multi-subject compositions.
• The model now outputs true 4K and gives much tighter control over fine-grain elements like lens choice, camera angle, depth of field, lighting, and other cinematic cues.
• Text generation gets a major lift. Pro can handle long blocks of text, multiple languages, different fonts, and full graphic layouts without melting into alphabet soup.
• It also ties into Search, letting the model pull real information from the web for accurate labels, charts, and world-aware scene generation.
Nano Banana Pro pushes visual generation closer to professional tooling, mainly because the text rendering and graphic accuracy are finally good enough for real workflows. The bigger shift is the model’s world knowledge. With Gemini 3 under the hood and direct access to live data, it moves beyond prompt wizardry and into something more like an actual creative assistant for information-heavy visuals.
Was this email forwarded to you?
That’s it for today and as always It would mean the world to us if you help us grow and share this newsletter with other operators.
Our mission is to help as many business operators as possible, and we would love for you to help us with that mission!
