Chapter 1
The United States has no federal artificial-intelligence statute
The United States has no federal artificial-intelligence statute. What it has instead is a contest over who is entitled to write one: state legislatures that have gone ahead without Congress, and a federal executive branch that has set about contesting them in court without a law of its own to point to. No court has yet held that any state AI law is preempted, and the tools doing most of the work on the federal side are executive orders.
Chapter 2
The states moved first
The states moved first, because they could. New York City began enforcing the first AI hiring-bias audit rule in July 2023. Colorado passed the first comprehensive state AI statute in May 2024, over its own governor's written reservations that it created a complex compliance regime and should be replaced by a federal one. California's governor vetoed a frontier-safety bill that September while signing a narrower disclosure law, AB 2013, requiring developers to publish summaries of the data their models were trained on. Texas followed with the Responsible AI Governance Act in June 2025, California with the frontier-AI transparency statute SB 53 that September, and Illinois with a safety-and-audit law in July 2026. Washington, meanwhile, kept changing direction. Executive Order 14110 of October 2023 imposed reporting duties on frontier developers; it was revoked on the first day of the next administration, replaced within three days by an order directing an "AI dominance" agenda, and elaborated in July 2025 into an action plan. None of it was legislation.
Chapter 3
The confrontation began on 11 December 2025
The confrontation began on 11 December 2025, when Executive Order 14365 made contesting state AI laws a federal assignment. It told the Attorney General to create a task force whose sole job is to challenge them in court, ordered a list of “onerous” state laws and tied some broadband money to it, and asked the Federal Trade Commission to say when its own Act overrides state rules. In March 2026 the White House followed with recommendations asking Congress to preempt state AI laws that impose “undue burdens”; Congress has not done so. The order’s first practical use came in April 2026 in Colorado: xAI sued the state attorney general to enjoin the Colorado AI Act, arguing that designing a model is protected speech and that the law's carve-out for algorithms advancing diversity violated equal protection; on 24 April the Justice Department moved to intervene against the statute, its first such intervention anywhere; and on 27 April the court suspended the law before it had ever applied, expressing no view on the merits. Colorado did not wait for the ruling. On 14 May Governor Jared Polis signed a bill repealing and re-enacting the Act as a narrower regime covering automated decision-making, dropping the mandatory risk-management programmes and impact assessments he had objected to two years earlier and deferring the obligations to 2027; a fortnight later he signed a second AI statute governing chatbots, and in August his attorney general filed the first draft rules ever written under a comprehensive state AI law. In July xAI took its speech argument to Minnesota, suing to stop a first-in-the-nation ban on nudification tools days before it applied. In parallel the federal executive has been building a gate of its own: an order of 2 June 2026 creates a review mechanism for the most capable models, voluntary by its own terms and triggered by a cyber-capability benchmark that is classified and that the director of the National Security Agency alone applies.
Chapter 4
The developer’s constitutional argument has still not been decided…
The developer’s constitutional argument has still not been decided anywhere, but it has now stopped a second law. xAI has brought three of these suits. In Los Angeles it lost: on 4 March 2026 a federal judge refused to block California’s training-data disclosure law, which has applied ever since, and the Ninth Circuit has had the appeal since that month. In Minnesota the trial judge twice declined to freeze the nudification ban — in July before it took effect, and again on 4 September — each time because xAI had waited too long to sue, not because the law had been found sound. The United States filed a statement in that case in August saying the ban conflicts with national AI policy, without asking the court for anything and without claiming that federal law overrides it. Then, on 2 October, the Eighth Circuit suspended the ban while xAI appeals, in an order that gave no reasons. So two state AI laws have been frozen at one developer’s request, and neither freeze rests on a finding that the law is unconstitutional: Colorado’s was agreed between the parties, Minnesota’s is unexplained. The federal government has still not asked any court to hold a state law preempted on its own account. What remains unresolved is whether an appeals court will accept that disclosure duties are compelled speech, or that a tool’s output is its maker’s expression; what the state regimes cost, since most do not bite until 2027; and how a developer is meant to know whether the federal gate applies to it, when the threshold rests on a benchmark nobody outside an intelligence agency can inspect. Polis’s call for Congress to settle the matter with a preemptive federal statute, made when he signed the first state law in 2024, is still unmet: the House headed into its 2026 midterm recess with no AI law passed, while California’s governor signed thirteen more in a day, citing “the absence of federal leadership”.
And now
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.
Where it stands today →