Fifty-state tracker shows US fragmentation widening beneath federal policy
Inside Practice · OCTOBER 28, 2026 · 1 MIN READ
On October 25, 2026, George Mason University’s Center for Assurance Research and Engineering published a 50-state AI policy tracker updated through October 21. The tracker reports that state AI bills grew from fewer than 200 in 2023 to 1,208 in 2025 and more than 1,561 across 45 states by March 2026, while no federal pre-emption measure had been enacted as of October 17. Multistate legal departments therefore face a changing set of sector, consumer, employment, chatbot and disclosure rules alongside the EU’s horizontal AI Act and the UK’s regulator-led framework. Compliance architecture should preserve jurisdiction-specific controls and effective-date logic rather than collapsing obligations into a single global policy.