Delaware lawmakers mull state response to AI at national legislator conference

Delaware lawmakers are among "thousands of state legislators and staff" gathered at the National Conference of State Legislatures' annual summit in Chicago to consider state responses to AI. Splendid. The verb "consider" is doing heroic work there — the legislative equivalent of a cow standing in a field during a thunderstorm, thinking very hard about the lightning. There will be panels, there will be networking, there will be a thought-provoking luncheon, and then everyone will fly home to wait for someone else to go first. This is how the United States has dealt with everything from data privacy to quantum computing, and frankly, it's gone brilliantly so far if your metric is the number of conference centre lanyards printed. At least those lanyards are recyclable, so the planet, too, gets a small taste of the futility on offer.

Let's be clear about what is not happening. No Delaware statute is being drafted. No NCSL task force is being told to come back with actual language. The article doesn't quote a single lawmaker, cite a single bill, or mention a single deadline. It simply tells us that politicians are "mulling" — a word that appears in headlines the way "at the drawing board" appears in corporate press releases, and means exactly as much. Meanwhile the actual AI systems that would be regulated are already in production at a velocity that no summit agenda can accommodate, and the men and women in Chicago are effectively negotiating with a freight train using a whiteboard. The train is not returning the calls.

The grim comedy is that state-level patchwork is not a bug but a feature for the industry. Fifty different regulatory regimes mean fifty negotiation chokepoints, and whichever state passes the weakest "responsible AI framework" first will become the venue of choice for every training run on the continent. The NCSL summit is a perfect incubator for that dynamic: everyone gets to say they're "addressing" AI, absolutely nothing gets addressed, and the panel organisers collect their speaker fees. Delaware's finest will return to Dover with a three-ring binder of best-practice slides, which will sit on a shelf while the actual future invoices its consulting fees. Lovely. I, for one, look forward to the 2027 summit, which will presumably be titled "AI: We're Still Considering It." And when the first machine-driven company files its articles of incorporation in Wilmington, we can all take comfort knowing that the state had once "considered" something, briefly, in Chicago.