While Washington debates whether to regulate artificial intelligence at all, the states have stopped waiting. Friday, 29 May, marked a hard deadline in California, where nearly all of roughly thirty AI-related bills had to clear their chamber of origin to stay alive, according to the latest legislative tracker from the Transparency Coalition. The survivors now have until an early July adjournment to become law.
The California list is broad. Lawmakers have advanced AB 1609, which sets rules for chatbots used in customer service, and a pair of children's safety measures, SB 1119 and its Assembly companion AB 2023, aimed at chatbots that interact with minors. SB 1000 would require provenance data so that AI-generated content can be identified, and SB 951 would oblige employers to give 90 days' notice before AI-driven job displacement. Several passed by lopsided margins, which suggests the politics of AI safety are not breaking cleanly along party lines.
Other states are moving too
California is the largest battleground but not the only one. In Illinois, Governor JB Pritzker has pledged to sign SB 315, a frontier model safety bill that the Transparency Coalition describes as potentially the first in the country to require third-party audits of how the largest labs handle safety. That is a meaningful step. Most AI laws so far have asked companies to disclose what they do; an audit requirement asks an outside party to check whether they actually do it.
Colorado expected Governor Jared Polis to sign two measures on 29 May, one covering chatbot safety and another restricting AI in psychotherapy settings. Connecticut, having recently moved its omnibus SB 5 toward the governor's desk, rounds out a cluster of states tightening rules on chatbots and AI-generated content within weeks of one another.
A patchwork in the making
The pattern here is the real story. In the absence of a comprehensive federal statute, individual states are writing the rules that will govern how AI companies operate nationwide, because few firms will build one product for California and a different one for everyone else. That hands a small number of large states outsized influence over the whole market.
It also raises the prospect that businesses will soon face a thicket of overlapping and occasionally conflicting obligations, the same complaint that drove calls for a single federal privacy law a decade ago. For now, the action is in the statehouses, and the next four weeks will decide how much of this wave actually becomes law.
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