Advocates for slowing down the artificial intelligence regulation drive are cheering on legislation in two states that would establish a right to compute.
A bill in Montana and a proposed constitutional amendment in New Hampshire are at the forefront of a libertarian-oriented backlash to the bipartisan effort to establish AI guardrails. Both measures aim to protect access to computing technology, such as hardware, software, networks and algorithms.
“We’re trying to make that a fundamental right because that’s what a free-thinking society does,” said Sen. Daniel Zolnikov (R), the sponsor of the Montana bill.
“It’s like the freedom of the press or the Second Amendment,” said Rep. Keith Ammon (R), who introduced the New Hampshire amendment. “I think it rises to that level.”
The nascent right-to-compute movement has its roots in earlier efforts to secure the right to access cryptography and, more recently, a push for rights related to the cryptocurrency industry.
Zolnikov in 2023 led to passage one of the nation’s first cryptocurrency right-to-mine laws. Ammon is sponsoring legislation this year to allow New Hampshire’s state treasurer to invest up to 10% of public funds in bitcoin.
The effort to establish computing rights comes as states are taking the lead on regulating AI and other tech industries, and while the new Trump administration is moving quickly to roll back constraints. Among his first acts, President Trump rescinded then-President Biden’s 2023 AI executive order and established a working group on cryptocurrency.
Regulation foes garnered extra ammunition this week with news of a Chinese AI model called DeepSeek that can compete with American-made models such as ChatGPT. China is widely seen as the United States’s biggest competitor in AI innovation.
Ammon said the idea for his amendment came from Steve Cobb, a former New Hampshire resident who now lives in Germany and works for an AI startup based in Dubai.
Cobb, who got to know Ammon after moving to New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project, launched a right-to-compute website about a year ago and has developed a model policy.
Cobb said he was particularly concerned by California Sen. Scott Wiener’s (D) AI safety bill last year, which aimed to place requirements on powerful AI frontier models with the goal of avoiding critical harms such as mass casualty events. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) vetoed the bill.
“We already have laws against doing bad things,” Cobb said. He summed up the right to compute as: “You have the right to do something until you violate somebody else’s rights.”
Montana’s libertarian roots and New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” motto make the states logical test beds for the right-to-compute concept.
Ammon called his measure a “conversation starter” and said he drafted it in large part because of Biden’s executive order on “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy” AI. He felt it represented government overreach and ran the risk of advantaging major players at the expense of startups.
“We don’t want three giant companies controlling the whole space, that would be a dystopian future,” Ammon said.
The Montana bill emerged from the Frontier Institute, a free-market Montana think tank that advocates for regulatory reform, crypto innovation and energy abundance. Tanner Avery, who directs the institute’s Center for New Frontiers, said the legislation was partly a response to the more than 600 AI-related bills that popped up in states last year.
“For us, the use of technology is an extension of fundamental rights,” Avery said. “We should be leaving the market open and letting ideas compete, and find out who wins that way.”
Efforts to place requirements on AI developers and deployers, Avery said, could squelch not only startups but also open-source models.
Zolnikov, who also authored Montana’s consumer data privacy law, said that while other states look to put guardrails around AI, he wants Montana to stand out as a pro-technology beacon.
“Most states are going in the wrong direction because of fear mongering,” Zolnikov said. “All it does is make it unfair to business.”
The Montana and New Hampshire measures’ introduction is supported by free market evangelists such as Adam Thierer, a technology and innovation senior fellow at the R Street Institute think tank.
“BOOM … THIS IS THE WAY!,” Thierer wrote on X after the Montana bill was introduced.
Thierer calls the right-to-compute movement a “major counterbalance” to the prevailing effort to establish guardrails for AI.
“A right to compute essentially reverses the burden of proof on digital innovators. … They are innocent until proven guilty,” Thierer said.
Others are critical of the concept.
Eric Gastfriend, executive director of Americans for Responsible Innovation, which calls for AI governance that protects the public while also supporting competition, called it “deeply out of touch.”
“Poll after poll shows that the general public overwhelmingly supports lawmakers creating some rules of the road for artificial intelligence,” Gastfriend said in a statement. “There’s no way policymakers want to make the same mistake they did on social media — by not acting or acting too late — as another technology changes the way we live.”