State leaders introduce legislation that would regulate AI in New Mexico

New Mexico has looked at the algorithmic horsemen and decided, bless it, to do some paperwork. Attorney General Raúl Torrez and Rep. Linda Serrato (D-Santa Fe) are proposing legislation that would regulate AI companies across data centers, transparency and data privacy — three words that between them cover roughly everything and promise approximately nothing. Torrez's line is a keeper: it is "ludicrous" to let the industry police itself. He's right, obviously. It's just that "the industry should not police itself" has been the consensus position of everyone who isn't being paid by the industry for about three years now, and the sum total of that consensus remains a handful of state bills.

The provenance is the funniest part. The bill was made after a meeting with President Donald Trump and tech leaders from across the United States — an event best understood as people who would prefer no rules at all, gathering to discuss how few they can get away with. The federal answer to AI governance remains the self-regulation doctrine Trump keeps blessing, which means the actual legislating has been outsourced to Santa Fe, of all the zip codes in the republic. The states are now the last functioning layer of American technology policy, which is like discovering the fire brigade is a bloke with a bucket.

Then there's the substance: data centers, transparency, data privacy — the confetti left over after the real fight. Nobody objects to "transparency" as a concept; the quarrel is over who reads the disclosure and whether anyone with subpoena power cares. Data centers at least have the decency to be physical — they use water, they use power, they sit somewhere with a planning committee and a ratepayer, and that is the only piece of AI anyone can currently point at. If New Mexico can regulate a building, good luck to it. Regulating the thing inside the building is a different bill, and everyone involved knows it.