With Americans increasingly anxious about how AI could harm mental health, jobs, and the environment, public demand for regulation is growing. If Congress stays paralyzed, states will likely be the one ones acting to maintain the AI industry in check. In 2025, state legislators introduced greater than 1,000 AI bills, and nearly 40 states enacted over 100 laws, based on the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Efforts to guard children from chatbots may encourage rare consensus. On January 7, Google and Character Technologies, a startup behind the companion chatbot Character.AI, settled several lawsuits with families of teenagers who killed themselves after interacting with the bot. Only a day later, the Kentucky attorney general sued Character Technologies, alleging that the chatbots drove children to suicide and other types of self-harm. OpenAI and Meta face a barrage of comparable suits. Expect more to pile up this yr. Without AI laws on the books, it stays to be seen how product liability laws and free speech doctrines apply to those novel dangers. “It’s an open query what the courts will do,” says Grimmelmann.
While litigation brews, states will move to pass child safety laws, that are exempt from Trump’s proposed ban on state AI laws. On January 9, OpenAI inked a cope with a former foe, the child-safety advocacy group Common Sense Media, to back a ballot initiative in California called the Parents & Kids Protected AI Act, setting guardrails around how chatbots interact with children. The measure proposes requiring AI corporations to confirm users’ age, offer parental controls, and undergo independent child-safety audits. If passed, it could possibly be a blueprint for states across the country searching for to crack down on chatbots.
Fueled by widespread backlash against data centers, states can even try to manage the resources needed to run AI. Meaning bills requiring data centers to report on their power and water use and foot their very own electricity bills. If AI starts to displace jobs at scale, labor groups might float AI bans in specific professions. Just a few states concerned concerning the catastrophic risks posed by AI may pass safety bills mirroring SB 53 and the RAISE Act.
Meanwhile, tech titans will proceed to make use of their deep pockets to crush AI regulations. Leading the Future, a brilliant PAC backed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and the enterprise capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, will attempt to elect candidates who endorse unfettered AI development to Congress and state legislatures. They’ll follow the crypto industry’s playbook for electing allies and writing the foundations. To counter this, super PACs funded by Public First, a company run by Carson and former Republican congressman Chris Stewart of Utah, will back candidates advocating for AI regulation. We would even see a handful of candidates running on anti-AI populist platforms.
In 2026, the slow, messy technique of American democracy will grind on. And the foundations written in state capitals could resolve how essentially the most disruptive technology of our generation develops far beyond America’s borders, for years to return.
