Highlights
In March 2026, the White House released its AI policy framework. As promised by President Trump in his December 2025 executive order, the framework outlines the kinds of policies the administration considers “minimally burdensome” to AI companies that it wants to see enshrined in a federal regulatory standard that would preempt state AI regulations.
Despite the failure of two previous legislative attempts to preempt state AI policy, the Trump administration defends its framework citing the danger of, in its words, “woke” blue state laws, such as the Colorado Artificial Intelligence Act or New York’s RAISE Act, and the threat that a “patchwork” of state policies posed to technological innovation and national security. “Fifty states [are] going in fifty different directions,” is how White House AI Czar David Sacks put it recently, citing in his comments “1,200” AI-related bills that have been introduced in state legislatures this year.
As we show in our new policy brief, the administration’s claims do not reflect the actual state of state AI policy. As Multistate.ai reported late last year, only 136 of 1,136 AI-related bills were enacted in 2025. And even fewer—26 to be exact—became laws that directly regulated AI companies. To put it differently, only 12% of all the AI-related bills introduced during the 2025 state legislative sessions became law, and 81% of those enacted laws contained no mandates for private AI companies.
Such claims alongside these findings prompt a need for a fuller, more accurate picture of the state of state AI regulation. How many state laws, beyond those just passed in 2025, are on the books? How many of those are in fact attempts to censor Americans or enshrine “woke ideology” in AI models? And how many are simply commonsense consumer protections or conduct regulations?
More importantly: is the policy landscape that’s emerging in fact a disparate patchwork of confusing and contradictory laws? Or do they indicate an emerging consensus about how Americans want AI to be regulated—a consensus that could serve as a template for a federal framework?
This IFS policy brief decisively finds the latter. Limiting the scope to state laws enacted between 2023 and 2025 that address AI in some manner (i.e., the era of ChatGPT), here are two high-level findings:
- To date, state laws regulating AI express a growing consensus among the American people regarding how they want AI to be governed. Americans want legislation that emphasizes inquiry, humanity, transparency, safety, security, and accountability. Contrary to David Sacks, there are not “50 states going in 50 different directions.” In fact, they seem to share very similar concerns.
- Additionally, only 33—or 12%—of the 276 enacted laws analyzed for this memo contained developer- and/or deployer-specific regulations. Moreover, such laws were passed in only 12 states, a few of which are red states. This hardly constitutes a dangerous “patchwork” of “1,200” laws.
That said, such findings need not repudiate the call for a federal AI standard or deny the usefulness of a properly tailored federal preemption. In fact, federal preemption of state law is a normal component of American life and is anchored in the Supremacy Clause of the United State Constitution, where it establishes federal law as “the supreme law of the land.” But preemption language in any piece of legislation can be tailored narrowly or broadly; and up to this point, Big Tech lobbyists in Washington have sought the broadest preemption possible for AI legislation, to the point where previous attempts would have very likely aborted even existing state regulations of social media. A more constructive approach, given the stakes of this issue, is typified by Senator Marsha Blackburn’s (R-TN) the TRUMP AMERICA AI Act, which clarifies via its preemption language that the bill should not be construed as hindering states from enacting even stronger protections for kids and consumers.
Whatever the case, our findings indicate that the current state of state AI regulation is not the dire “patchwork” that the administration claims. Moreover, these laws provide a critical starting point for the kinds of regulatory measures legislators—especially those in Congress who are considering a federal framework—might consider that better reflect the preferences of Americans.
Read or download the full policy brief, "Patchwork or Consensus: State AI Policies Reveal What Americans Want."
