‘States should have a say’: Candidates for governor race to take on AI regulation - POLITICO

POLITICO has done the arithmetic on state-level legislation and the answer is eighteen: 18 laws, across 13 states, led by both Republicans and Democrats, each one cheerfully contradicting the White House's preemption framework. Eighteen is a number with the ring of a movement about it, right up until you remember how thinly that spreads. Bipartisan, no less — both parties have now discovered federalism in the way a man discovers an umbrella once it is already raining. The White House has a framework; the states have laws; the two have still never been formally introduced.

Pennsylvania's Josh Shapiro has called on the federal government to 'step up' and regulate the AI industry, which is a charming request to aim at an administration whose working AI strategy is a politely worded instruction that states sit down and be quiet. Cox, meanwhile, wants Washington to establish a 'consistent national framework for frontier AI' — consistent with what, exactly, is the detail nobody supplies, because the moment you specify it you have picked a winner and lost a donor. 'Step up' and 'step back' are the same sentence read from different postcodes.

So the governor's races fill up with candidates racing to 'take on AI regulation', a phrase that means everything and commits to nothing, in the same fortnight that California's kill-switch order we raised an eyebrow at on September 18 went out the door. Eighteen laws in thirteen states is a heartwarming grassroots story, right up until you notice how much of the map is still blank and how many frontier labs are already drafting the compliance memo they will never send. 'States should have a say' is the placard. The say will be heard, logged and preempted, probably in that order.