The National Conference of State Legislatures is a bipartisan organization serving the legislators and legislative staff of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the US territories. It provides research, technical assistance, and 50-state bill tracking, and represents state legislatures in federal policy debates.
Bill tracking
NCSL maintains more than 40 legislation-tracking databases, of which the Artificial Intelligence Legislation Database is the reference series for state AI legislation. It tracks bills from 2025 forward, updates monthly, includes all introduced legislation, and tags records into 24 topics spanning appropriations, government use, private sector use, health use, deepfakes, energy, provenance, responsible use, and studies. Per-session summary pages published since 2019 carry headline counts of states introducing and states adopting or enacting AI measures. The counting bases, published figures, and the gap between aggregate and enumerated counts are set out at Counting state AI legislation (Source: ncsl.org).
Figures from other NCSL trackers appear across the record: more than 35 states offering data-center incentives or tax breaks, and data-center moratorium bills under consideration in 14 states as of June 2026. An NCSL survey found that 44% of state legislative staff used AI in their work in 2025, up from 20% in 2024 (Source: economist.com).
Positions
NCSL joined NASCIO, the National League of Cities, the US Conference of Mayors, and the Council of State Governments in a joint statement in early 2026 opposing the December 2025 executive order on state-AI preemption, describing its preemption posture as a move that "risks weakening protections for Americans" and proposing an intergovernmental AI working group with a federal floor on which states could build (Source: nascio.org).
Convening
NCSL's Legislative Summit is a venue at which AI policy is put to state legislators directly. At the 2026 summit in Chicago, Geoffrey Hinton addressed legislators in a session titled "The Promise and Peril of AI," offering the formulation that "innovation is like the accelerator of the car, and regulation is the steering wheel" (Source: ncsl.org).
Relationships
- related: Counting state AI legislation (its AI figures and their scope); State-Level AI Regulation; AI Federalism; Data Center Siting / AI Power Politics
- contradicts: EO — Trump Federal Preemption of State AI Laws (Dec 11, 2025) (joint statement opposing preemption)