Nobody is governing AI

Tuesday, April 7, 2026

The technology is everywhere. The laws are not.

Wiktor Szymanowicz / Future Publishing via Getty Images

Artificial intelligence is now making hiring decisions, tutoring children, optimizing power grids, and targeting weapons systems. The rules governing any of that are, almost everywhere, either nonexistent, stalled in committee, or under active attack.

In the United States, the federal government has spent three years producing executive orders, frameworks, and guidelines, none of which have become law. States that tried to fill the gap have been threatened with funding cuts and lawsuits. In Europe, the most ambitious AI legislation in the world is being delayed or softened before most of it has even taken effect.

The technology, meanwhile, has not paused for any of this.

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States refuse to stand down

The latest effort from Washington is an AI legislative framework released in March, calling on Congress to pass federal rules that would supersede state laws. The White House argued that a patchwork of state regulations would slow American companies and hand an advantage to China. The proposal addressed children's safety, data center energy costs, and intellectual property, while making clear that uniform national policy was the priority.

States have largely ignored it.

California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an executive order requiring AI companies that contract with the state to follow safety and privacy standards, and said he would fight to preserve existing California laws protecting residents from AI-related harms.

New York passed a bill requiring companies to report AI safety incidents. Illinois amended human rights law to require disclosures when AI is used in job recruitment. Minnesota has seven AI bills moving through its legislature this year.

The administration has used more than policy papers to push back. A White House letter to Utah legislators effectively killed a bill that would have required AI companies to publish safety plans. Florida's governor failed to get an AI bill passed after the White House came out against state-level intervention.

The disagreement has caused fractures in the Republican Party. The Utah lawmaker who introduced the AI bill killed by the White House plans to reintroduce it. A group of Republican state lawmakers wrote to the White House asking it to let states act.

The administration has also tried to lead on data centers. In March, President Trump gathered executives from Amazon, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and others at the White House to sign a voluntary pledge committing companies to cover the energy costs of their data centers, responding to bipartisan anger over rising utility bills. The pledge carried no penalties for non-compliance.

States are not waiting on that either. Indiana and Ohio have already passed laws requiring large energy users to pay for the infrastructure built to serve them. In Georgia, a similar bill failed after heavy lobbying from the data center industry. Virginia is weighing whether to end a sales tax exemption for data centers that cost the state $1.6 billion last year.

Europe blinks

Across the Atlantic, the picture is a different version of dysfunction. The E.U. spent years building the world's most ambitious AI regulatory framework, the AI Act, which came into force in 2024. Now it is walking parts of it back.

The European Parliament voted to push back the compliance deadline for high-risk AI systems to late 2027, with sector-specific rules for medical and automotive applications delayed further to 2028.

The European Commission is also proposing to loosen parts of the General Data Protection Regulation, better known as GDPR, making it easier for companies to share personal data for AI training. Even the region's notorious cookie consent pop-ups are being streamlined.

The retreats came after sustained lobbying from U.S. tech companies and pressure from Washington. European officials framed the changes as pragmatic adjustments to avoid burying smaller European firms under compliance costs. Critics described it more simply: Brussels blinked.

Not everything is being softened. The EU Parliament voted to ban so-called nudification apps, AI tools that generate non-consensual intimate images, marking one of the first outright prohibitions of a specific AI product category. That move came in the wake of a scandal involving Grok, the AI system on X, which produced a flood of sexualized deepfakes of women and girls after a new image-editing feature rolled out in late 2025.

The dual-track approach, delaying broad compliance requirements while banning specific harms, reflects the bind regulators everywhere find themselves in. The technology moves faster than legislative calendars. Overcorrect and you may strangle innovation; undercorrect and real people get hurt.

Polls show majorities of Americans want guardrails on AI. So do voters in Europe. What they are getting instead is more AI, in their schools, their doctors' offices, their workplaces, with very little oversight.

—Jackie Snow, Contributing Editor

The technology is everywhere. The laws are not.﻿

Speak at Harvard, Co-Author a book With Les Brown, be Featured in a Film?﻿

States refuse to stand down

Europe blinks

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The technology is everywhere. The laws are not.

Speak at Harvard, Co-Author a book With Les Brown, be Featured in a Film?