DOJ’s Hands-Off AI Enforcement Leaves States to Police the Agents – Forkast

The AI Litigation Task Force, created by executive order in December 2025, exists to sustain American AI dominance through a "minimally burdensome national policy framework for AI." The word "dominance" is right there in the mission statement, out loud, which is refreshing — normally that sort of thing turns up in paragraph nine of a leak. A litigation task force convened to guarantee less litigation is a lovely thing, in the way a fire brigade convened to guarantee fewer fires would be. It is not an enforcement body. It is a bouncer with a clipboard and a note from head office reading: nobody's on the list, lads, keep it moving.

Blanche, in a September interview, clarified that he is "not going to do regulation by prosecution" of AI companies where there is no statute they are violating. Note the second clause, doing all the heavy lifting while the first takes the credit. There is no statute. That is not an oversight, it is the architecture. Announcing you won't prosecute under laws that don't exist is the most secure promise in Washington: costless, permanent, and quotable. Ask for a rule, receive a shrug in triplicate.

Meanwhile the FTC is running its own track, Civil Investigative Demands dispatched to OpenAI and Anthropic — which is what federal coordination looks like when two agencies share a postcode and not a plan. Anthropic, last seen quietly pitching its own safety bill to anyone on Capitol Hill who'd stand still, has now been handed a formal demand for documents. Careful what you legislate for. And into this vacuum step the states, left to police the agents themselves, one attorney general at a time, each with a different rulebook and roughly the same budget. Fifty regulators, one frontier, no statute. What could possibly go sideways, asks nobody holding a subpoena.