State Technology Policy Report 2025

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Executive Summary

In this report — our fourth in this series — we provide an overview of developments in state technology policy over the last year. We analyze the changing political architecture at the state level during the 2025 legislative sessions, review key developments in state technology legislation and litigation during 2025, and provide predictions on what the state policy landscape could look like in 2026.

Our analysis revealed eight key findings.

1. The year of narrowing priorities. In 2025, 48 states passed 345 pieces of technology regulation across eight categories, a 45% increase from last year. While we saw increases in nearly every category over last year, states eschewed broad, comprehensive laws, instead enacting narrower, more targeted statutes.

2. Deepening partisanship. Democrat and Republican legislators not only prioritized different broad categories of tech regulation — privacy, tax, and antitrust for blue states, and child online safety, data centers, and crypto for red states — they also pursued different priorities within each topic.

3. Everything is AI. Enacting 159 laws, states across the country passed a wide range of new AI laws, from regulating the use of AI in state governments to imposing safety protocols on frontier models. Broadly, states moved away from algorithmic discrimination and pre-deployment reviews toward transparency, consumer protection, and companion chatbot provisions.

4. Child safety legislation matures. States continued to push forward new age verification requirements for app stores, social media sites, and those hosting adult content. Simultaneously, states enacted a series of new social media design restrictions and requirements aimed at reducing risks to minors.

5. Cracks in support for data centers. While the majority of state data center regulations extended tax incentives, a handful of states have enacted new disclosure or process provisions, indicating that the growing public concern about the impact of data centers may be influencing statehouse priorities.

6. An increasingly fragmented privacy map. No new comprehensive privacy laws were enacted this year. Instead, states strengthened and refined existing laws, leading to a more fragmented and diverse landscape of U.S. privacy laws.

7. Two crypto paths. States enacted 28% fewer crypto laws this year — the only category with a reduction from last year. States either embraced or rejected the emerging federal crypto framework, enacting a series of narrow laws that aimed to either exempt or include cryptocurrencies in existing financial regulations and to support either consumer rights to use crypto or consumer protections from the crypto industry.

8. Digital tax laws keep a low profile. Despite continued litigation against Maryland’s digital advertising tax, Washington enacted an alternative model for a digital advertising tax. Several other states also imposed taxes on digital products and services.

This year, state legislatures passed more technology policy-related laws than last year, just as they have each year we have published this report. Figure 1 shows the number of laws passed in each of the eight topics we cover for both 2025 and 2024; Figure 2 breaks down the number of laws across categories sponsored by each party. Figure 3 shows the average number of laws enacted by states with trifecta control. Figure 4 shows the number of laws enacted by each state.

Following the success of comprehensive consumer privacy regulation across the country, the failure of every one of the dozens of “comprehensive” algorithmic discrimination laws introduced in 2025, was one of the most notable and surprising developments this year. This year saw a similar move away from comprehensive privacy, crypto, and child online safety regulation, as legislators embraced narrower, more targeted regulation.

The Trump administration’s developing approach to tech policy provided one of the other key contexts for state tech lawmaking this year. The administration’s opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts helps explain, at least in part, the shift away from AI regulation focused on algorithmic discrimination. State legislators in Republican-led states worked to translate the administration’s crypto policy into state regulation. Finally, the administration’s push to enact a federal moratorium on state enforcement of AI regulation appears to have kick-started several blue-state efforts to enact strong AI regulation, including the New York RAISE Act’s regulation of frontier models.

Based on our analysis, we also look ahead to the upcoming legislative session to ask: How will states approach technology policy in 2026? For each of the issues covered in this report, we offer a set of predictions about how state tech policy will unfold over the course of the next year. But broadly speaking, we anticipate:

• Technology policy will continue to be a priority in many states.

• The “divide” between red and blue states on tech policy will continue to deepen.

• Despite federal efforts to forestall state AI regulation, many states will continue to aggressively pursue AI and online child safety reform – giving particular attention to the areas where the two intersect.

Over the last several years we identified four roles that states often take in technology policy: as trailblazers, leading the way in new regulation; as barometers, waiting for guidance from the federal government or the courts; as passengers, following the policy process led by other states or the federal government, or finally as bulwarks to fortify state policy against potential action by the federal government.

As the Trump administration clarifies and asserts its positions on tech topics, we anticipate it will continue to have an oversized influence on state technology regulation. Specifically, we anticipate that states will shift into one of two roles: passengers, following the Trump administration’s priorities, or bulwarks, actively working to counter them.

At the end of 2025, the Trump administration considered, but did not issue, an Executive Order that would have created a federal AI Legislative Task Force “whose sole responsibility shall be to challenge State AI laws.” Simultaneously legislators indicated they were considering either including the moratorium on state AI policy enforcement that had been removed from the Big Beautiful Bill in the National Defense Authorization Act or introducing it as a stand alone bill.

Even if these efforts to stop state AI legislation development are unsuccessful, the clear demonstration of the Trump administration’s position against state AI regulation may, at a minimum, lead to some Republican-led states slowing the pace of AI regulation.

In contrast, there has been significant pushback against the idea of a federal AI moratorium from both parties — and we expect some red and blue states to object strongly to Trump’s efforts to limit state AI legislation.

While we generally anticipate that technology policy will remain a key priority for many state lawmakers next year, structural forces may slow the pace of state efforts in 2026. A handful of states, such as North Carolina and Oregon, have shorter sessions in even-numbered years. Others, such as Texas, North Dakota, Nevada, and Montana, do not hold regular sessions in even-numbered years.

The upcoming midterms may also disrupt or moderate state efforts on tech policy. The shorter sessions are designed, in part, to give legislators time to campaign. Some researchers have suggested that there tends to be less state legislative activity in election years because of these shorter sessions.

On one hand, the midterms could mean legislators continue to pursue more targeted bills in pursuit of easy legislative wins. On the other hand, legislators may look to marquee messaging bills meant more to fill out stump speeches than to actually be enacted. In that case, we would expect to see more child safety bills — especially those focusing on the risks that AI pose to children — introduced, but not necessarily enacted, across the state houses.