Americans for Responsible Innovation Launches 50-State AI Policy Advocacy Effort

Americans for Responsible Innovation has launched a national operation to advocate for stronger safeguards in state AI bills. The effort will work across all 50 states and focus, ARI says, on frontier-AI risks and threats to workers and families.

ARI, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on AI safety advocacy since its 2023 founding, plans to hire roughly a dozen staffers for the new branch. Bloomberg Government reported that the group is backed by philanthropic organizations including Omidyar Network and Coefficient Giving.

To succeed in passing the guardrails necessary to sustain AI innovation while protecting the public interest, the state arena can no longer be treated as a secondary front.

Brad Carson, president, Americans for Responsible Innovation

The job is to influence bills before they harden

ARI says the operation will start by finding emerging AI bills around the country and offering policy expertise to state lawmakers. Its aim is to put responsible-AI guardrails into legislation and to prioritize the public interest in its work with lawmakers. The initiative is an advocacy and policy-support operation, not a single national rule.

• Identify emerging state AI bills.
• Offer policy expertise to state lawmakers.
• Advocate for legislative AI guardrails.

A federal proposal favors one rulebook

The launch comes as federal policymakers consider preempting some state and local AI laws. Bloomberg Government characterized federal AI legislation as stalled in Congress. On July 23, Reps. Jay Obernolte and Lori Trahan introduced the bipartisan FRONTIER Act, a proposed national risk-based framework for the development and deployment of the most advanced AI models.

The FRONTIER Act proposes model cards, risk-management frameworks, independent audits, incident reporting and ongoing assessments for certain frontier-AI developers. It would also limit specified state obligations concerning catastrophic-risk transparency, third-party auditing and incident reporting. The bill’s sponsors say it would create a uniform national standard for transparency, auditing and catastrophic-risk reporting rather than a patchwork of state rules.

The state arena becomes a more deliberate target

The sponsors describe the federal bill as targeted at the largest frontier-AI developers rather than smaller innovators. ARI’s move does not determine how lawmakers will resolve the balance between state-level safeguards and nationally uniform obligations. It gives the group a staffed operation intended to make its case in every state.