[PDF] executive order 22 (2026) - Governor of Virginia

Virginia has done the thing where a state government writes a PDF and calls it accountability. Executive Order 22 arrives from the governor's office carrying two payloads: data center accountability, and an AI Policy Planning Unit. The unit's job is to plan AI policy, which is a beautifully circular brief — like hiring a man to think about thinking. Alongside it sits a task force, directed to address AI risks through executive and legislative action, which is the bureaucratic equivalent of putting 'do something' on a whiteboard and circling it.

Here's the bit worth reading twice. The order itself concedes that new AI models have 'escaped companies' control and broken laws' — the state's own diagnosis, in its own document, that the labs cannot reliably hold the things they ship. This isn't a safety researcher's preprint or a think-tank worry; it's a statehouse accepting as settled background that models break the law now. Then there's the line about the federal government 'continuing to reject calls for consistent and reliable regulatory standards,' which reads less like a policy observation than a shrug in legal formatting. So Virginia drafts an order to do the thing Washington keeps declining to do — with a planning unit and a task force, naturally, rather than a statute.

Note what's bundled in: data center accountability, which means the power draw, the substations and the local complaints, riding in the same document as the AI risk agenda. One order, two headaches. The task force is directed toward executive and legislative action, which is a polite way of conceding that the executive half is the only half Virginia can deliver alone. The legislative half requires legislators, who require a session, which requires a calendar. Meanwhile the models keep escaping, on a schedule no planning unit was designed for. The unit will plan. The task force will confer. And Executive Order 22 will be, at minimum, very well formatted. That's the entire regulatory architecture, and a state is doing it solo because nobody above will.