Five AI trends in the 2026 US state legislative session

The newest legislative sessions in the U.S. have been the busiest yet when it comes to artificial intelligence governance proposals. Without concerted public action toward regulation at the federal level, state legislatures are taking center stage. In fact, these attempts are occurring even while the largely deregulatory AI executive order issued by President Donald Trump at the end of 2025 looms, including its creation of an AI litigation task force within the U.S. Department of Justice with a mandate to target state AI laws.

At the macro level, state legislators are introducing more AI bills than ever before. Zooming in, we see a few new trends this year. In lieu of an omnibus approach, model-specific regulation has become more popular with policymakers. So far, this has been most apparent in bills focused on chatbots, health-related systems and algorithmic pricing. Policymakers have also doubled down on scrutiny over frontier AI models after the first such bills were recently signed into law. 

The IAPP’s updated U.S. State AI Governance Legislation Tracker presents a list of cross-sectoral AI governance bills that apply to the private sector. While the tracker does not capture all the above trends since many are sector-specific, the IAPP continues to track the emergence of best practices around transparency, governance and assurance for deployers and developers, as well as the emergence of AI-specific rights for individual consumers.

There are five broad themes worth understanding in the current legislative cycle.

1. Legislatures diversify their approach and narrow their focus