State AI Lawmaking Slows in 2026 as Trump Task Force Looms

Two numbers sit at the top of Tech Policy Press's mid-year map of state AI legislation. States have enacted 109 AI laws and 28 data center laws by July 1, 2026, but the pace has slowed: 29 states passed AI legislation this year, down from 39 by the same point in 2025.

The slowdown is not the whole story. In December 2025, President Trump signed an executive order establishing an AI Litigation Task Force charged with challenging state AI laws that were not 'minimally burdensome,' and directing the Department of Commerce to explore withholding BEAD broadband funding for states enacting 'onerous' AI laws. According to Tech Policy Press, states with enacted AI laws averaged $742.2 million in BEAD funding, while states without such laws averaged $920.9 million. That is a real lever to hold over state capitals.

Where states are still moving, the pattern is telling. Companion chatbots are the runaway category: over 100 bills introduced, 14 enacted, building on California and New York's 2025 laws that require warnings the bot is not human and address risks including sexual content involving minors and self-harm. Data centers are the other surge, from Oklahoma's Data Center Customer Ratepayer Protection Act to oversight bills in Alabama and Idaho, tax-incentive rollbacks in Washington and Maine, and a moratorium in New York that is pending Governor Hochul's action. On frontier models, California and New York moved first in 2025 requiring developers to adopt safety frameworks and report critical incidents, Illinois recently added yearly third-party audit requirements, and Connecticut enacted whistleblower protections.

The honest caveat is that roughly 31% of enacted AI laws had bipartisan sponsorship, and 61% of Republican-controlled states and 69% of Democratic-controlled states have enacted something, so the state-level picture is less red-versus-blue than the federal fight suggests. What the reporting does not settle is whether the BEAD threat will actually be exercised, when the litigation task force files its first suit, or how the Illinois audit rule gets operationalized in practice.

For anyone building or deploying frontier systems, the practical read is that the state compliance surface is still growing, unevenly, and the federal ceiling on all of it remains politically live. Watching Massachusetts, California, and New Jersey's next frontier and chatbot proposals, along with Hochul's decision on the New York data center moratorium, will tell you which way the pressure runs.