Aggregate counts of US state AI legislation circulate widely and are rarely comparable. The figures differ on three axes at once: whether the unit counted is a state, a measure, or an enacted law; whether resolutions and study mandates count alongside binding statutes; and whether legislation addressing a single AI technology — deepfakes, facial recognition, autonomous vehicles — is inside or outside the scope. A claim that some number of state AI laws exist is therefore uninterpretable without its counting basis.
The National Conference of State Legislatures maintains the reference series. This page records what NCSL publishes, with the as-of date attached to each figure, and sets out where the counting bases diverge.
The NCSL series
NCSL publishes two artefacts: a per-session summary page carrying a headline sentence, and a live bill-tracking database.
| Session | Introduced | Adopted or enacted | Page as-of |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | All 50 states, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Washington, D.C. | 38 states, "around 100 measures" | July 10, 2025 |
| 2024 | At least 45 states, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Washington, D.C. | 31 states, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands | September 9, 2024 |
| 2023 | At least 25 states, Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C. | 18 states and Puerto Rico | January 12, 2024 |
| 2022 | At least 17 states | Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Maine, Maryland, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington (8) | January 31, 2023 |
| 2021 | At least 25 states | Alabama, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia (13) | January 31, 2023 |
| 2020 | At least 13 states | Alabama, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Utah (5) | January 31, 2023 |
| 2019 | At least 20 states | Alabama, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Texas, Vermont (12) | January 31, 2023 |
(Sources: ncsl.org; ncsl.org; ncsl.org; ncsl.org)
No 2026 summary page has been published. As of August 4, 2026 the 2026-session URL following NCSL's own naming pattern returns a 404, and no aggregate figure for the 2026 session appears on the database landing page. The database's year filter offers 2025 and 2026, so the underlying 2026 records exist and are queryable per state and status; only the published headline is absent.
What the database counts
The Artificial Intelligence Legislation Database (ncsl.org), last updated July 1, 2026, states its own scope: years tracked 2025–present, updated monthly, "all introduced" legislation included. It "reviews enacted and pending legislation beginning in 2025 and is updated monthly as legislation is identified by NCSL staff." Bill status is one of Adopted, Enacted, Failed, Failed–Adjourned, Pending, Pending–Carryover, To Governor, To Mayor, or Vetoed, so "adopted" (resolutions) and "enacted" (statutes) are separable in the data even where the summary pages merge them into a single phrase.
Records are tagged into 24 topics: appropriations, audit, child pornography, criminal use, cybersecurity, deepfake, education/training, education use, effect on labor/employment, elections, energy, government use, health use, housing, impact assessment, judicial use, notification, oversight/governance, personhood, private right of action, private sector use, provenance, responsible use, studies, and taxes. The breadth matters: a bill funding an AI workforce-training program, a bill creating a study task force, and a bill imposing duties on developers of high-risk systems all count as AI legislation.
The summary pages carry an exclusion that runs the other way: "This webpage covers key legislation related to AI issues generally. Legislation related solely to specific AI technologies, such as facial recognition, deepfakes or autonomous vehicles, is being tracked separately." Deepfake bills therefore sit inside the database's topic taxonomy but outside the summary pages' headline counts — the two artefacts do not share a scope.
Why counts diverge
Three distinct quantities are routinely conflated.
States that acted. NCSL's headline unit. "38 states adopted or enacted" in 2025 says nothing about how many instruments each passed, and a state appears once whether it passed one resolution or nine statutes.
Measures adopted or enacted. NCSL's only published instrument count is "around 100 measures" for the 2025 session, and it includes adopted resolutions — the 2025 page's own illustrative list contains a New Jersey resolution urging voluntary whistleblower commitments from generative-AI companies, which creates no obligation on anyone.
Enacted laws imposing obligations. No NCSL artefact reports this directly. It has to be built by filtering the database to Enacted and reading the bills, or assembled from an independent enumeration.
The gap between the first and third quantities is large enough to reverse a threshold test. An enumeration of the policy-notable state AI enactments recorded across legislation/ — Idaho; Maryland HB 895; Montana; Colorado SB 189; Nebraska LB 525; New Jersey; Illinois SB 315; Illinois HB 5511 — yields 8 laws across 7 states, because the criterion for a page here is policy salience rather than legislative output. That figure is a floor: it can confirm that a threshold has been crossed and can never refute one. NCSL's 2025 figure of roughly 100 measures across 38 states is an aggregate over a much broader scope. Neither is wrong; they answer different questions, and a threshold expressed simply as "state AI laws" is satisfiable or unsatisfiable depending on which is used.
Non-NCSL counts of the 2026 session
With no NCSL summary page for 2026, the circulating figures for that session come from advocacy trackers running their own counting bases. The Transparency Coalition's legislative update of August 7, 2026, written by Bruce Barcott, reported 85 new AI-related laws enacted across 27 states so far in 2026 and listed seven legislatures still in session — California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Ohio, New Jersey, and North Carolina — describing the week ending August 7 as the quietest of 2026 with most in-session legislatures on summer break (Source: transparencycoalition.ai).
The 85-across-27 figure is an enacted-law count, which is the third of the three quantities distinguished above and the one no NCSL artefact reports. It is therefore not comparable to NCSL's "38 states adopted or enacted" for 2025, which counts states, nor directly to the "around 100 measures" figure, which includes adopted resolutions. The Transparency Coalition does not publish a scope statement equivalent to NCSL's exclusion of legislation addressing a single AI technology, so whether deepfake-specific and facial-recognition statutes are inside the 85 is not established from the update itself.
Open questions
- Whether NCSL publishes a 2026-session summary page, and if so, what unit its headline uses.
- How many 2025- and 2026-session records carry status
Enactedas againstAdopted, which the database can answer per state but which no published figure reports. - Whether the deepfake topic tag in the database and the deepfake exclusion on the summary pages produce materially different totals for the same session.
- What counting basis the Transparency Coalition's 85-laws-across-27-states figure for 2026 uses, and whether single-technology statutes fall inside it.
Relationships
- depends-on: State-Level AI Regulation (the substantive index of what the individual instruments do)
- related: National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL); AI Federalism; Reverse Federalism; Colorado AI Act (SB 24-205); Illinois SB 315 (frontier safety framework with mandatory third-party audits); Nebraska LB525 — Conversational AI Safety Act + Agricultural Data Privacy Act