Sen. Patty Murray meets with state policymakers to discuss AI regulations as federal action sputters

Sen. Patty Murray has done the modern American legislator's version of a day's work: she convened a meeting. With federal action on AI regulation sputtering — spokesman.com's phrase, and a generous one for 'nothing has happened' — the senator sat down with Washington state policymakers to discuss where the rules should go. Gov. Bob Ferguson, meanwhile, signed a trio of bills earlier this year, which is three pieces of legislation more than the federal sputter appears to have produced. So the states draft, pass and sign, and the Senate schedules a chat about it.

Among Ferguson's trio: a requirement that AI-enhanced recordings carry provenance data. Marvellous — a nutrition label on a forged passport. The metadata survives precisely as long as it takes someone to run the file through a converter, and the people who leave it intact were never the ones you were worried about. The other named measure covers AI chatbots aimed at children, which is the regulatory equivalent of sending a chaperone round at 1am to check on the disco. The children have been chatting to these things for a while; the rulebook has arrived fashionably late and brought a laminated badge.

This is the same state-by-state patchwork we looked at recently — Louisiana and Maryland attempting deepfake law and discovering its limits — and now Washington state signing provenance rules and child-chatbot protections while the federal government sputters. It is a genuinely noble laboratory of democracy, in the sense that laboratories are for experiments, and nobody is meant to be living in one. Murray has been in the Senate long enough to have watched a great many of these meetings conclude successfully and change nothing measurable. The provenance data will be stripped, the chatbot rules will be outrun by the next release, and someone will schedule a follow-up meeting, which is the closest thing American AI policy has to a completed product.