A few days ago I wrote a shortform wondering if anyone had done a breakdown of the different state-level AI bills that had been proposed.
People seemed interested, and so I ended up doing the analysis and writing up my findings. This is the beginning of the piece, which is posted on my Substack:
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People keep saying that US states have proposed 1,000+ AI-related bills this year.
This statistic has been at the center of a major Congressional fight in the “Big Beautiful Bill”: whether to strip individual states of their ability to regulate AI, via a 10-year moratorium on state AI regulation.
Here’s the issue: The claim about the supposed 1,000+ state AI bills doesn’t hold up to analysis, nor does the implication that the bills would hobble innovation.
I dug into the supposed “1,000+” state AI bills directly, as well as reviewed third-party analysis. Here’s what I found:
- Roughly 40% of these supposed bills don’t seem to really be about AI.
- Roughly 90% of the truly AI-related bills still don’t seem to impose specific requirements on AI developers. (Sometimes these laws even boost the AI industry.)
- More generally, roughly 80% of proposed state bills don’t become actual law, and so quoting the headline number of bills is always going to overstate the amount of regulation.
All things considered, what’s the right headline figure? For frontier AI development, I would be surprised if more than 40 or so proposed state AI bills matter in a given year, the vast majority of which won’t become actual law. If these laws would in fact contradict each other, I would like for critics to note these contradictions more directly, rather than implying it via the alleged number of proposed bills.
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Analysis continues, with many examples, here.