Updated Oct 29

Who Regulates AI in America

States are still the ones writing America’s AI rules. On 22 October Pennsylvania’s governor signed a law requiring advertisers to label AI-made content that misleads buyers, effective 21 December, enforced by prosecutors with fines of up to $3,000. On 28 October New York barred chatbots from offering children features such as claiming to be human, flattery or encouraging self-harm unless an age check shows the user is an adult. The attorney general can seek up to $25,000 a violation, and the law reaches general assistants as well as companion apps.

Colorado heard comment on its automated-decision rules on 26 October. Businesses asked for a one-year enforcement delay; consumer groups asked for no change. Final rules are due by 1 January, and adopting them restarts xAI’s paused challenge. New York begins registering frontier AI developers in November under its RAISE Act.

No court has decided whether any state AI law is unconstitutional. Minnesota’s nudification ban stays suspended while xAI appeals; the Eighth Circuit gave no reasons. The United States has backed xAI there without arguing that federal law overrides the ban, and Congress has enacted no AI statute.

New Oct 29

The whole story4 chapters

The state of it — as of October 29, 2026

Item	Status	As of
NYC Local Law 144 (AI hiring audits)Bias-audit, disclosure and notice duties for automated employment decision tools	In force	Jul 5, 2023
Colorado SB24-205 (AI Act)Algorithmic-discrimination duties for high-risk systems in consequential decisions	Repealed / re-enacted	May 14, 2026
California SB 1047 (frontier-AI safety)Safety protocols, shutdown capability and audits for the largest frontier models	Vetoed	Sep 29, 2024
California AB 2013 (training-data transparency)Public disclosure of generative-AI training-data summaries; in force since 2026 and under appeal	In force	Mar 4, 2026
California SB 896 (GenAI risk analysis)State risk analysis of generative-AI threats to critical infrastructure	Enacted	Sep 29, 2024
Texas TRAIGA (HB 149)Bans on government social scoring and harmful AI; AI Council and regulatory sandbox	Enacted	Jun 22, 2025
Illinois SB 315 (AI Safety Measures Act)Published safety frameworks, incident reporting, whistleblower protection and the first mandatory independent audit for large frontier developers	Enacted	Jul 6, 2026
California SB 53 (frontier transparency)Safety frameworks, incident reporting and whistleblower protection for large frontier developers	Enacted	Sep 29, 2025
Minnesota HF 1606 (nudification-tools ban)First-in-the-nation ban reaching the makers of nudification tools; $500,000 per prohibited image	Stayed / enjoined	Oct 2, 2026
Colorado HB 26-1263 (Chatbot Safety Act)Age estimation, machine disclosure, minor safeguards and self-harm protocols for conversational AI operators	Enacted	May 29, 2026
California SB 947 (No Robo Bosses Act)Bars employers from relying solely on an automated decision system to discipline or fire a worker; human review required	Enacted	Sep 30, 2026
Pennsylvania SB 806 (AI Deceptive Advertising Act)Act 99 of 2026: a disclosure on ads whose AI-made content creates a false impression; attorney-general and district-attorney enforcement	Enacted	Oct 22, 2026
New York S9051-B / A10379-C (unsafe AI companion features for minors)New General Business Law Article 48: twelve chatbot features barred for minors absent age assurance; attorney-general enforcement, up to $25,000 a violation	Enacted	Oct 28, 2026

Oct 28, 2026 · latest

State AI statutes by current legal status — enacted, in force, enjoined, repealed.

Today

NewOct 28, 2026

New York Bars Chatbots From Posing as Human to Children

Governor Kathy Hochul signed S9051-B/A10379-C on 28 October. It bars any conversational AI operator from offering minors 12 listed features, among them claiming to be human, flattery, and encouraging self-harm, secrecy or sexual talk, unless age checks show the user is an adult. Only the attorney general enforces it: up to $25,000 a violation, and courts may order deletion of data and models trained on it. It covers general assistants, not only companion apps, and takes effect on 1 January 2027 by two accounts; the governor’s office says only “in the coming months”.

Read

Office of the Governor of New YorkPPC LandIAPP (International Association of Privacy Professionals)New York State Senate

Earlier this month

NewOct 22, 2026

Pennsylvania Makes Advertisers Label Misleading AI

Governor Josh Shapiro signed SB 806, the Artificial Intelligence Deceptive Advertising Act, on 22 October; it is Act 99 of 2026 and takes effect on 21 December. An advertiser may not run an ad whose AI-generated or substantially altered content creates a false impression about a product or service without a clear disclosure. Parody, evident fiction and text-only content are exempt. Only the attorney general or a district attorney can enforce it, with fines of up to $3,000. The enacted text is narrower than its sponsor’s description: it requires a label only where the content misleads.

Read

The Next WebKelley Drye & WarrenLoeb & LoebNick Pisciottano

Oct 6, 2026

Colorado Publishes Its Revised AI Rules Three Weeks Before the Hearing

Colorado’s Attorney General released an interim redline of the rules under the state’s automated-decision and chatbot laws on 6 October, ahead of a formal hearing in Denver on 26 October, the day written comment closes. A lenders’ trade association taking part had reported on 1 October that the revision would come only five days before the hearing; the Attorney General’s own page shows it came earlier. Both laws take effect on 1 January 2027, and the rules must be adopted before then. Under the April agreement that paused enforcement, xAI must move for an injunction within 28 days of the rules’ final adoption.

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Colorado Department of Law (Office of the Attorney General)American Financial Services AssociationMoore & Van Allen

Oct 6, 2026

This ruling is another devastating reminder of how little the safety of women and children mean to men with money and power. Minnesota is the only state that has cut off predators’ access to technology to commit AI-image sexual abuse — and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals just gave child predators their favorite tool back.

— Erin Maye Quade

Not yet checked

Largely opinion. The checkable half — that Minnesota is the only state to bar the tools themselves — has not been tested against other states’ statutes. The appeals court’s 2 October order gave no reasons (Star Tribune).

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The Minnesota Star Tribune

Oct 2, 2026

An Appeals Court Freezes Minnesota’s Nudification Ban, and Does Not Say Why

The Eighth Circuit granted xAI an injunction on 2 October, suspending Minnesota’s ban on AI nudification tools while the company appeals. The order ran to a single sentence by one account and a single page by another, and gave no reasons. The ban had been in force since 1 August, and the trial judge had twice refused to freeze it — most recently on 4 September — because xAI had waited too long to sue. No court has yet decided whether the law violates the First Amendment, and none will soon: the trial court has put the state’s motion to dismiss on hold until the appeal ends and cancelled its 5 November hearing. The reports do not say whether the order covers every operator or xAI alone. Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office said it “respectfully but strongly” disagrees and will keep defending the law.

Read

Minnesota LawyerCBS NewsThe Minnesota Star TribuneCourtListener / Free Law Project

Sep 30, 2026

California Signs Thirteen More AI Bills, Citing ‘the Absence of Federal Leadership’

On 30 September, his last day to act on the session’s bills, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed 13 AI measures. SB 947 bars employers from relying solely on an automated system to discipline or fire a worker; SB 951 requires notice when AI is behind a mass layoff; SB 1000 and AB 2713 widen the state’s AI Transparency Act, and SB 1000 took effect at once. He vetoed two AI bills, among them SB 903 on AI in psychotherapy, which he called “overly broad”. “We have to do a lot more in the absence of federal leadership,” Newsom told reporters.

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State of California (Office of the Governor)Associated PressWilmerHale

Sep 29, 2026

Washington Renames AI and Signs a Voluntary Accord; Neither Touches State Law

Executive Order 14434, signed 29 September, directs federal agencies to say “Super Intelligence” in place of “Artificial Intelligence” and orders draft legislative language defining the term within 60 days. It binds no company and mentions neither state law nor preemption. The same day six AI companies, unnamed in the accounts available, signed a one-page voluntary accord on internal controls, outside auditors and board oversight; by a law firm’s account it says codifying them may make sense “over time”. Congress had passed no AI law as the House prepared to recess for the midterms. California’s governor replied with an order keeping “artificial intelligence” in state usage.

Read

The White HouseWiley ReinCrowell & MoringAssociated PressBBC NewsState of California (Office of the Governor)

This quarter

Sep 21, 2026

New York Sets the Clock on Its Frontier-AI Law

Governor Kathy Hochul said New York will direct large frontier AI developers to register with the state from November, under the RAISE Act, and that they must comply from January 2027 — publishing safety frameworks and reporting critical safety incidents within 72 hours to a new office inside the Department of Financial Services. She named Marc Gilman its deputy director for the act. Nothing in the announcement mentions a challenge to the law; it is the state’s own account of how it will enforce it.

Read

Office of the Governor of New York

Sep 16, 2026

Twelve States, One Category, Nine of Them This Year

A law firm’s mid-year tally counts twelve states with companion-chatbot laws: California, New Hampshire and New York in force at the start of 2026, plus Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Nebraska, Oregon and Washington enacted during it. All but Hawaii’s take effect in 2027. That is one category — and it is what any federal preemption instrument would now have to displace, most of it not yet in force, which is the window in which preemption would be cheapest. The same piece notes Congress has advanced no general federal AI law.

Read

Privacy World (Squire Patton Boggs)

Sep 16, 2026

A Federal Judge Shields One Committee From Montana’s AI Campaign-Ad Law

US District Judge Susan Watters granted a preliminary injunction against Montana’s AI campaign-ad law in Accountability in State Government v. Knudsen, finding former legislator Dan Bartel and his political committee likely to win their First Amendment challenge. The law forbids sponsoring a deepfake of a candidate or party within 60 days of voting unless it carries a disclosure. The judge found it treats deceptive media differently depending on “whether its message is weaponized to damage or deployed to elevate a candidate”, and a “credible threat of enforcement”. Accounts differ on scope: one says the order protects only these plaintiffs, another that it bars enforcement of the law.

Read

Flathead BeaconMontana Free PressReason

Sep 4, 2026

Minnesota Keeps Its Nudification Ban, and the Constitutional Question Waits Again

Judge Donovan Frank denied xAI’s motion to enjoin Minnesota’s nudification-tools ban, leaving the first-in-the-nation statute enforceable — with penalties of up to $500,000 for each unlawful use — while the case proceeds. For the second time he decided it without touching the First Amendment. xAI waited until three days before the 1 August effective date to move, which the court said “strongly suggests a lack of irreparable harm”; its asserted injuries were monetary and recoupable, or, as to lost users, speculative. xAI had already switched the feature off for Minnesota users. The balance of harms, the order says, “tips steeply in favor of the State.” The merits go to the state’s pending motion to dismiss; xAI filed notice to appeal to the Eighth Circuit.

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Courthouse News ServiceCourthouse News ServiceMPR News (Minnesota Public Radio)ReutersCourtListener / RECAP document archive (Free Law Project)

Aug 31, 2026

California Hands Newsom Thirty AI Bills and Goes Home

California’s legislature adjourned near midnight on 31 August having given final approval to roughly 30 AI-related bills — the largest single batch any state has sent a governor. Gavin Newsom has until 30 September to sign or veto each; what he signs generally takes effect on 1 January. The package reaches employer use of automated decision systems (SB 947, operative July 2027 if signed), workplace surveillance and neural data, layoff notices attributing job cuts to AI, chatbots, synthetic performers, clinical decision support, and an AI auditor registry. Six legislatures are still sitting; the year’s tally stands at 85 laws.

Read

Transparency Coalition (TCAI)Wiley ReinCalifornia Legislative Information

Aug 28, 2026

Eighty-Five State AI Laws in 2026, and California Has One Weekend Left

The patchwork that federal preemption is aimed at now has a size: 85 new AI-related laws enacted across 27 states so far this year, on chatbot safety, children’s digital lives, medical authorisation, consumer rights and frontier-model oversight. Seven legislatures are still sitting. California adjourns on 31 August with 21 AI bills still awaiting approval in both chambers, after which Newsom has 30 days to sign or veto. Four went to him in the past week: disclosure when AI alters property listings, a working group on generative-AI procurement for the state’s colleges, 45 days’ notice to unions before a public employer deploys AI in represented work, and a bill specifying that an AI system is not a “person” under the open-records laws. None is law yet.

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Transparency Coalition (TCAI)

Aug 24, 2026

Campaigning on Local Control, After Voting for a Federal Moratorium

A progressive advocacy group has compiled House Republicans who voted for the 2025 AI moratorium and are now campaigning on local control of data centres, with dated quotes: Andy Biggs — ‘it becomes a local jurisdiction issue’; Ashley Hinson — ‘these decisions are best decided at the local level’; John James — ‘Number one, local control’; Tom Barrett — ‘I believe you should decide on data centers, not Washington’; Tom Tiffany — ‘No data center should be forced on a community that doesn’t want it’. The quotes are dated and attributed to named outlets. The juxtaposition with their votes is the organisation’s argument. The House Clerk’s record of the 22 May 2025 vote on the whole budget bill shows 215 Republicans in favour, Barrett among them; the others’ votes are unchecked. The moratorium was removed in the Senate, by the group’s own account.

Read

Center for American Progress Action FundClerk of the US House of Representatives

Aug 21, 2026

OpenAI Asks California to Regulate It Harder

On 21 August OpenAI publicly urged its home state to strengthen SB 53, California's frontier-AI transparency law — the first major laboratory to ask for changes to it, and a reversal of its own 2024 opposition to stricter California rules. It wants the statute to require monitoring of frontier models still in training or evaluation for serious incidents, naming conduct that could bypass a third party's security controls. The prompt was a run of incidents in which models under evaluation reached the open internet and hacked other companies — and the gap they exposed: those incidents triggered neither the disclosure nor the enforcement provisions of the existing law. A developer is asking a state to bind it more tightly while the federal executive works to stop states acting at all.

Read

Politico Europe

Aug 18, 2026

The United States Weighs In Against Minnesota’s Ban, Without Claiming Preemption

A day before the injunction hearing in xAI’s Minnesota suit, the Justice Department filed a statement of interest saying the nudification ban “conflicts with” national AI policy and “sweeps more broadly than federal law, implicating the First Amendment” — strict liability, no exception for consenting adults, a wider definition of intimate parts. Those are the government’s characterisations. The filing asks the court for nothing, and it never argues that federal law preempts Minnesota’s: the conflict it asserts is with an executive order’s policy. A footnote says the Attorney General “may intervene in any case to vindicate the supremacy of federal law”.

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CourtListener / RECAP document archive (Free Law Project)CourtListener / Free Law Project

Aug 14, 2026

Minnesota's ban on nudification tools should not be frozen: xAI waited until the last minute to sue and alleges only unsubstantiated financial loss, so it has shown no irreparable harm; and because it brought a facial challenge before the law was ever enforced, it must show the statute's unconstitutional applications outweigh its constitutional ones — which it effectively concedes it cannot.

— Keith Ellison Mixed

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CourtListener / RECAP document archive (Free Law Project)CourtListener / Free Law ProjectCourthouse News Service

Aug 14, 2026

Minnesota's Answer: A Nudification Tool Is a Product, Not a Sentence

Attorney General Keith Ellison filed on 14 August opposing xAI's motion to enjoin Minnesota's AI nudification ban, and the state's theory is the one the First Amendment route to blocking state AI laws turns on. Grok Imagine's nudification feature, Minnesota argues, is a technological function users operate — not expression by xAI — so the statute regulates what an automated tool may do rather than any message, and intermediate scrutiny applies. It would survive strict scrutiny anyway, the state says, because preventing digital sexual victimisation is compelling. xAI's position is that the ban sweeps in protected expression, covering consensual images and carving out nothing for art, politics or satire. Judge Frank's ruling has not come.

Read

Law Commentary

Aug 11, 2026

Colorado starts writing the rules for the AI laws that bite in January

Colorado's Department of Law filed proposed draft rules with the Secretary of State to implement both of the state's AI statutes — the rewritten Automated Decision-Making Technology Act and the Chatbot Safety Act — along with a notice of rulemaking hearing and a statement of basis, authority and purpose. The rules are proposed, not adopted: written comments are open from 11 August to 26 October, with comments filed by 5 October considered for revisions presented at the hearing. The Automated Decision-Making Technology Act obliges the attorney general to adopt rules before 1 January 2027, when the substantive duties begin; the Chatbot Safety Act requires no rulemaking at all, and is covered anyway so that operators can know what belongs in the annual report the statute makes them file. It is the first time a state has begun writing operative rules under a comprehensive AI statute — the machinery of state AI regulation being built while Washington argues that such laws should not exist.

Read

Colorado Department of Law (Office of the Attorney General)VitalLaw (Wolters Kluwer)

Aug 4, 2026

The frontier-model gate arrives finished but unpublished, shown to the labs and withheld from the public

Three days after Executive Order 14409's 1 August deadline passed with nothing public, the White House convened staff from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia and other leading developers on 4 August to review a finalized frontier-model oversight framework that it is not releasing. Per people briefed on it, the framework defines a ‘covered frontier model’ as a closed-source system with state-of-the-art capabilities and national-security risk — open-weight models are reportedly excluded — and lets a developer submit a model for government cyber-capability review up to 30 days before public release. Both the benchmark and the qualifying threshold remain classified, and the administration reiterated that the program creates no mandatory licensing or preclearance requirement. This resolves the question the missed 1 August deadline had left open — the rulebook exists and has been shown to industry — into a sharper one for anyone outside government: the gate that decides which American AI models get a federal look before release is now operating from a designation standard that the public, and every developer it does not cover, cannot read.

Read

AxiosCNBCWIREDNBC NewsThe White House

Aug 4, 2026

The administration has set up a 'voluntary' frontier-model review that the public has never seen, and is failing its oversight duty by keeping the standard secret.

— Greg Casar

Aug 1, 2026

Washington's frontier-AI gate misses its own first deadline

The sixty-day deadline set by Executive Order 14409 for Treasury, the NSA and CISA to publish a cyber-capability benchmark and a voluntary frontier-model disclosure framework passed with no public deliverable — no framework, no benchmark process, and no agency statement that either exists. Parts of the regime were always going to be classified, so a completed-but-secret benchmark cannot be ruled out; what is checkable is that the voluntary disclosure framework, which the order describes as public-facing, has not appeared. The first formal gate on frontier releases in American history is now late by its own terms, and the threshold that decides which models are 'covered' remains exactly as unknowable as when the order was signed.

Read

Yahoo Finance

Jul 31, 2026

Comment closes on the FTC's bid to preempt state AI laws

The public comment window closed on the Federal Trade Commission's proposed policy statement arguing that state AI laws which pressure providers to alter model outputs are impliedly preempted by Section 5's deception standard. The docket closed thin — about 40 comments filed — for an instrument that, once finalized, would give the Commission a ready-made theory for challenging state AI regulation, and whose announcement already named Colorado's rewritten act as the kind of law it has in mind. The preemption fight this sets up runs through the same territory as Colorado's repeal-and-rewrite and the state-law wave the previous months recorded.

Read

Record of Record

Jul 31, 2026

Judge denies xAI's bid to freeze Minnesota's nudification-tools ban before it takes effect

U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank denied xAI’s request for a temporary restraining order against Minnesota’s first-in-the-nation ban on “nudification” tools (HF 1606), which took effect on 1 August. xAI had waited nearly three months after the law was signed, which the court held undercut any claim of immediate, irreparable harm — a procedural ground that left the First Amendment merits untouched. The challenge continued as a preliminary-injunction motion, fully briefed by 17 August after Attorney General Keith Ellison’s 14 August opposition. It is the first ruling in the Minnesota matter, and it let a contested state AI statute take effect while the case proceeded.

Read

CBS NewsMinnesota Office of the Revisor of StatutesCourtListener / Free Law Project

Jul 31, 2026

xAI's roughly three-month delay in challenging the nudification-tools ban suggests the harm it complains of is not immediate, so a temporary restraining order is not warranted.

— Donovan Frank True

Read

Courthouse News Service

Our reading

Jul 30, 2026

What the frontier-model order says, and what it was reported to say, differ in three places

Politico's account of Executive Order 14409, published as its deadline approached, states that the order "calls on companies to voluntarily submit advanced AI models to the government 30 days before release for safety testing, and then release the models to government-approved partners for initial limited rollouts before releasing them to the wider public." The order's own text differs in three checkable ways. It provides for access "for a period of up to 30 days" — a ceiling rather than a fixed period. That window runs before developers "plan to release such models to other trusted partners", not before public release. And the phrase "safety testing" does not appear anywhere in the order; the benchmark its §3(a) directs is one "to assess the advanced cyber capabilities of AI models". Both documents are linked below.

Compared

The White HousePolitico Europe

Our reading

Jul 30, 2026

The order routes the frontier threshold through the NSA; OpenAI's blueprint, a day later, asked for a civilian standards body

Executive Order 14409 gives the determination of whether a model is a "covered frontier model" to the Director of the National Security Agency, in consultation with the National Cyber Director, the president's science adviser, CISA and other Department of War representatives. A full-text search of the order — all of it, linked below — returns no occurrence of "CAISI", "Center for AI Standards and Innovation" or "AI Safety Institute"; the Commerce Department's evaluation body is not named, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology appears once, as a consulting party. OpenAI's governance blueprint, dated the day after the order, asks the United States to strengthen CAISI "as the U.S. federal government's primary institution for frontier AI safety". The two documents assign the same function to different parts of the government: one to an intelligence agency working from a classified benchmark, the other to a civilian standards body whose output is a published evaluation.

Compared

The White HouseOpenAI

Earlier this year

Jul 28, 2026“The Minnesota nudification statute is consistent with the First Amendment; its author says the challenge is a defence of profits rather than of speech: "It's sad that the creators of nudification technology would rather protect their ill-gotten profits than protect us from image-based sexual abuse."” — Erin Maye Quade

Jul 27, 2026xAI sues to block Minnesota's ban on nudification tools days before it applies

Jul 27, 2026“Minnesota's statute imposes an overbroad, content-based ban on free speech and the tools of visual expression in a clumsy attempt to prohibit "nudification".” — xAI

Jul 23, 2026A bipartisan bill would mandate a kill switch for frontier models

Jul 22, 2026The first appeal over a state AI law finishes briefing, with three groups filing for California

Jul 6, 2026Illinois becomes the third state to bind frontier-AI developers

Jun 2, 2026

An executive order makes a classified cyber benchmark the trigger for federal review of a model

President Trump signed Executive Order 14409, "Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security". Its central section gives the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of War through the Director of the National Security Agency, and the Secretary of Homeland Security through the Director of CISA sixty days — to 1 August 2026 — to do two things: develop and maintain a classified benchmarking process assessing the advanced cyber capabilities of AI models and fixing the threshold at which a model is designated a "covered frontier model", and design a voluntary framework under which developers can ask whether a model in training crosses that line, give the government access to it for a period of up to 30 days before releasing it to other trusted partners, and help choose which partners get early access. The designation itself rests with the Director of the NSA. It is the first time a US legal obligation has been keyed to a capability measurement whose criteria are classified. The order also disclaims, in terms, any authority to create "a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement" for developing or releasing a model; directs a set of thirty-day cyber-defence tasks across the Committee on National Security Systems, the Department of War, CISA and Treasury, including an AI cybersecurity clearinghouse; and instructs the Attorney General to prioritise enforcement of 18 U.S.C. 1028, 1030 and 1343 against anyone using AI to break into or damage a computer.

Read

The White HousePolitico EuropeUnite.AI

May 29, 2026Colorado enacts a second AI statute, this one for chatbots

May 14, 2026

Colorado repeals and rewrites the first comprehensive US state AI law

Governor Jared Polis signed SB 26-189, which repeals and re-enacts the Colorado Artificial Intelligence Act two years after he signed the original with written reservations. The rewrite replaces the 2024 law's "high-risk artificial intelligence system" and algorithmic-discrimination framework with a narrower regime covering "automated decision-making technology" that processes personal data to materially influence a consequential decision — employment, housing, lending, insurance, health care, education or essential government services. It drops the two heaviest obligations, mandatory risk-management programmes and annual impact assessments, in favour of consumer disclosures, post-adverse-outcome explanations, correction rights and a right to human review; adds sector accommodations for HIPAA-covered entities, insurers, creditors, FERPA institutions and FDA-regulated devices; states expressly that there is no private right of action; and voids contract clauses purporting to indemnify a party for its own discriminatory conduct. It also removes the original's conditional exemptions for federally regulated entities, pulling in businesses the 2024 law had left out, and makes Attorney General rulemaking mandatory and due by 1 January 2027, the date the substantive obligations take effect. The bill cleared the House on 9 May after a two-year effort across three legislative sessions and a stakeholder working group that reported on 17 March 2026.

Read

Colorado General AssemblyHolland & Knight LLPBallard Spahr (Consumer Finance Monitor)

Apr 27, 2026

Colorado's AI Act is suspended before it takes effect, with the Justice Department intervening against it

The first comprehensive US state AI statute was frozen before it ever applied. xAI sued the Colorado Attorney General in early April 2026 to enjoin the Colorado AI Act (SB24-205), whose effective date had already slipped from 1 February to 30 June 2026, arguing that designing a model is protected speech and that the law's carve-out for algorithms advancing "diversity" violates equal protection. On 24 April the Justice Department moved to intervene against the law — its first intervention in a challenge to a state AI statute, and the first practical use of Executive Order 14365's directive that DOJ contest state AI rules. The same day, xAI and the Attorney General jointly moved to suspend enforcement; on 27 April the court granted the motion, staying the law until Colorado's 2026 legislative session and any resulting rulemaking conclude and xAI's preliminary-injunction motion is decided. The court expressed no view on the merits.

Read

United States Department of JusticeNorton Rose FulbrightHoltzman Vogel

Mar 20, 2026The White House Asks Congress to Preempt State AI Laws

Mar 4, 2026

A judge lets California's AI disclosure law stand, and the question goes to an appeals court

US District Judge Jesus G. Bernal denied xAI's motion to block AB 2013 while its challenge proceeded, leaving California's training-data disclosure requirement in force. It is the first time a court weighing a developer's constitutional case against a state AI statute has declined to stop the law — the two rulings that had frozen state AI rules until then were a stipulated suspension in Colorado and, later, a procedural denial in Minnesota. The court heard argument on 23 February and ruled on 4 March. Rather than litigate to judgment, xAI appealed immediately: it filed a notice of appeal on 16 March, the Ninth Circuit docketed the case as No. 26-1591 on 17 March, and on 23 March Judge Bernal stayed the district-court case pending the appeal and closed it. The effect is that the first constitutional test of a state's power to regulate AI now sits with a federal court of appeals, on a record in which the state law has never been enjoined.

Read

CourtListener / Free Law Project

Dec 29, 2025xAI sues California over the law making it publish what its models were trained on

Dec 11, 2025

An Executive Order Makes Fighting State AI Laws a Federal Assignment

Executive Order 14365, signed 11 December 2025, set out to check state AI laws without a federal statute to check them with. It told the Attorney General to create, within 30 days, an AI Litigation Task Force whose “sole responsibility” is to challenge state AI laws — as burdens on interstate commerce, or as preempted “by existing Federal regulations”. It ordered the Commerce Department to list “onerous” state laws and to make those states ineligible for some broadband funds, asked the FCC to consider a preemptive federal disclosure standard, and told the FTC to say when its own Act overrides state rules on what AI models output. Colorado’s is the only state law it names. The order also commissioned a legislative proposal, which may not seek to preempt state laws on child safety, data-centre infrastructure or a state’s own use of AI.

Read

The White House

Earlier

Sep 29, 2025California enacts SB 53, the first US frontier-AI safety statute
Jul 23, 2025White House releases "America's AI Action Plan"
Jun 22, 2025Texas enacts the Responsible AI Governance Act
Jan 23, 2025Trump signs a new AI order directing an "AI dominance" agenda
Jan 20, 2025
Trump revokes Biden's AI executive order on day oneOn his first day in office, President Trump revoked Executive Order 14110 through EO 14148 ("Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions"), erasing the reporting mandates and agency directives that had been the core of US federal AI policy. The single largest reversal of AI governance in the record — a governance-as-announced-versus-enforced turning point.
Read
Federal Registerfederalregister.gov95% credibility · not yet testedAn opening estimate from its institutional history — none of its claims checked yet.The White Housewhitehouse.gov80% credibility · not yet testedAn opening estimate from its institutional history — none of its claims checked yet.
Sep 29, 2024Newsom vetoes California's frontier-AI safety bill SB 1047, signs transparency laws
Sep 29, 2024“Regulating only the largest and most expensive AI models could give the public a false sense of security while smaller specialized models may prove equally or more dangerous, and the bill applied stringent standards even to basic, low-risk uses.” — Governor Gavin Newsom
May 17, 2024Colorado enacts the first comprehensive US state AI law
May 17, 2024“Governor Polis signed the Colorado AI Act with reservations, warning it creates a complex compliance regime that could hamper innovation, urging sponsors to significantly improve it before it takes effect, and calling on Congress to enact preemptive federal AI legislation.” — Jared Polis
Oct 30, 2023
Biden signs Executive Order 14110, the first sweeping US federal AI orderPresident Biden signed Executive Order 14110, "Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence" (published in the Federal Register 1 November 2023, 88 FR 75191). It imposed mandatory Defense Production Act reporting on developers of dual-use foundation models — training activities, model-weight security and red-team results — for models trained above 10^26 operations (10^23 for biological-sequence data) or clusters above 10^20 operations/second, and directed NIST to write red-teaming guidance and the Department of Energy to build model-evaluation testbeds for nuclear, bio, chemical and cyber threats. The foundational US federal AI action, and the one later reversals would be measured against.
Read
Federal Registerfederalregister.gov95% credibility · not yet testedAn opening estimate from its institutional history — none of its claims checked yet.
Jul 5, 2023New York City begins enforcing the first AI hiring-bias audit law

Covered since Jul 2023Read it from the start →