State lawmakers dug in this year on efforts to regulate the tech industry by passing more than 200 new laws, according to a report set to be released Thursday.
The Center for Social Media and Politics and the Center on Tech Policy, both at New York University, found that nearly half of those laws are related to artificial intelligence. The report also identified child online safety, data privacy, cryptocurrency-related legislation and tax breaks for data centers as leading issues in statehouses this year.
Taken together, the new laws represented a 163% increase in tech policymaking at the state level compared to 2023. Nearly 90% of the new laws were passed in the 40 states where one party controls both the legislature and the governor’s office, also known as trifecta states. California led the pack with 26 new tech laws.
“For each of the last three years, we have seen states increase the scope and quantity of state regulation,” the report said. “This year, facilitated by a historic level of single-party control, we saw states disregard legal challenges and push forward on broad and narrow tech policy.”
AI was the year’s hot topic, with 41 states passing 107 AI laws, by the report’s count, including a first-in-the-nation comprehensive regulation in Colorado. Many of the other AI-related laws addressed intimate- or election-related deepfakes and using AI to replicate the work of singers or actors.
Data privacy was another trending issue in 2024. Seven more states passed comprehensive data privacy laws bringing to 19 the total number of laws. In addition, 18 states passed laws this year protecting biometric data, including novel laws in California and Colorado to safeguard neural data.
Lawmakers also showed no sign of letting up on their desire to try to make online spaces safer for kids. Forty-eight new online child safety laws were passed this year that focused on age-gating pornographic sites, regulating social media, and giving parents more control over their child’s online presence. They included first-in-the-nation restrictions on addictive social media feeds for kids in California and New York.
Maryland became the second state, after California, to pass an Age-Appropriate Design Code law.
A new trend also emerged with seven states passing laws related to cell phone use in schools and classrooms.
But as fast as states pass new laws limiting teen access to social media, the tech industry is suing to block them citing constitutional infringements. In most cases, the industry has won initial injunctions.
The report was authored by Scott Babwah Brennen, who directs the Center on Tech Policy, and by Zeve Sanderson, executive director of the Center for Social Media and Politics. The Center on Tech Policy was until recently housed at the University of North Carolina. It receives funding from foundations and from the tech industry.
Among the authors’ predictions for 2025 is that state legislators will try to replicate some version of Colorado’s first-in-the-nation comprehensive AI regulation law, which targets high-risk decision-making systems. Blue states are also likely to look to Maryland’s new privacy law as a more consumer-protective model to emulate.
One wildcard is the incoming Trump administration. The report said the new president’s policies could galvanize even more state-level tech regulation — or have the opposite effect.
“We generally expect Democratic-led states to function as trailblazers, regulating areas where the federal government is prioritizing deregulation, such as AI and crypto,” the report said. “We also expect them to act as bulwarks, (pro)actively pushing back against possible federal action on issues like platform content moderation and privacy.”
Republican-led states, the report predicted, are likely to follow the Trump administration’s lead on deregulating crypto and “prioritizing AI innovation over risk mitigation.”
An emerging issue is data center policy. It is gaining fresh urgency in states because of the computing power needed for AI, which will require more data centers and result in more demand for electricity and water. The report predicts states will continue to compete for data center construction but that Democratic lawmakers may begin to explore “new oversight, study, or auditing requirements for data centers.”
Read more: Data center boom in Virginia will double power demand, report finds
“For nearly a decade, almost all of state legislation on data centers has granted tax relief in order to attract data centers,” the report said. “However, legislators are increasingly questioning the risks or harms that data centers pose to their states.”