Gov. Moore addresses wealth gap, AI and midterm stakes durin...

The word Wes Moore reached for was 'laughable,' which is a generous upgrade on what the president's actual AI doctrine deserves. Maryland's governor, speaking at an ALC55 roundtable in Washington on Sept. 17, assessed the White House line on AI's dangers and found it funny — which is the correct reaction to a federal posture that has, as we noted last week, consisted of proposing an 'AI Force' and declining anything resembling a rule. Laughing is free. Legislating is not. One of those is available to a governor in Maryland, and it is the cheap one.

So Maryland will have a go instead. Moore says the state is looking at additional state-level regulation because, absent federal action, AI 'may prove detrimental to our lives' — note the conditional tense, the hedge that keeps every statehouse busy legislating the easy parts while the frontier outruns any committee calendar. Note also what is not on the menu: a national floor, a licensing regime, an incident-reporting duty, anything with teeth and a Washington postcode. Fifty experiments, zero referee, and a diagnosis that is entirely correct and structurally unactionable. The labs will not slow down for Annapolis.

And this was, remember, a roundtable that bundled AI with the wealth gap and the midterm stakes into a single afternoon's agenda — which is the tell. AI has graduated from technology briefing to campaign furniture, something to be gestured at between the economy panel and the fundraising reception. Moore is one of the better ones; being correct in a state capitol while Washington shrugs and the model releases keep coming is a specific and familiar kind of tired. The president's position is laughable, he says. The alternative on offer is a Maryland-sized answer to a planetary problem. One of those is funny; neither is reassuring.