WA leaders weigh state AI guardrails as Congress remains stuck | The Seattle Times

Patty Murray — Democratic senator, Washington state, and a woman who has evidently priced in that the other chamber is a decorative fixture — convened a 'handful' of state officials in Olympia last week to discuss AI regulation. A handful. That is the unit of measurement now: America's answer to the most consequential technology of the decade is however many people fit around one table in the state capital. Murray says states have a 'critical role' while she still wants a 'strong federal safety floor,' and both sentences are true at once, which is the tragedy — she wants a floor, and she knows nobody is pouring the concrete.

Meanwhile, per the International Association of Privacy Professionals — a body whose remit appears to include maintaining a tidy spreadsheet of exactly this — Washington is not among the 23 states that have enacted comprehensive consumer privacy laws. Twenty-three states got there first. Washington cannot yet agree with itself on what a privacy law is, never mind what an AI law should say. So the senator convenes a handful of officials in Olympia to weigh 'guardrails,' which is the word we reach for when we'd like to be seen doing something without anyone being able to point at precisely what.

We flagged a fortnight ago that the midterms were never going to produce major federal AI legislation, which was less a prediction than an observation about where the oxygen is. The Seattle Times headline says Congress 'remains stuck,' and 'remains' is generous — it implies someone, at some point, pushed. What's actually coming is fifty rulebooks, drafted by handfuls of people in fifty capitals, and every AI company will end up employing more lawyers than researchers just to cross a state line. That isn't a safety floor — that's a patchwork quilt somebody will inevitably trip over. Credit where it's due, though: Murray convened a handful. It's a start. A very small one.