Breaking the Cycle of Bad Regulation
In the book of Ecclesiastes, the author writes of the cyclical nature of human affairs. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
While the author of the Biblical text could not have anticipated much of modernity, the principle is evergreen and particularly true of AI regulations. What begins in California or Colorado is recycled and reworked in legislatures across the country, as states pursue sweeping regulatory frameworks of their own. While the scale and ambition of these proposals is repetitive, so too are the inevitable consequences of trying to expand government control over a technology that the economy, businesses, and people of the nation have rapidly begun to rely upon.
For instance, early in Louisiana’s 2026 legislative session, a “Consumer Bill of Rights Regarding Artificial Intelligence” was floated. If passed, the bill would have expanded the requirements governing AI development while creating penalties for violating these compliance measures and increasing the legal liability of AI companies. Aside from chilling innovation in the state, the consumer bill of rights would have threatened longstanding norms of interstate commerce, by attempting to regulate a national market. No surprise, this strategy was not original to Louisiana. A similar piece of legislation tried and failed in Florida shortly before the Louisiana bill was up for debate. The Florida “AI Bill of Rights” died in early March, and offered a preview for the later fate of the Louisiana bill, which was withdrawn in early April.
Lawmakers are not condemned to repeat the mistakes of their peers. The White House released a national framework to guide state legislation in this area, and it doesn’t look like a maze of compliance measures and legal protocol. The framework decries the harms of state laws that impose “undue burdens” and calls instead for a national standard to provide clarity and fuel for innovation. The bill authors of recently shelved AI regulations in Louisiana cite this very framework as a strong incentive to pause their efforts.
The White House framework’s approach is not novel either. It relies on tried-and-true concepts of capitalism and federalism. By empowering innovators to create and compete against each other, a better product is forged. This product is then tested against the integrity and preferences of the free market, with the bulwark of preexisting consumer protection laws and legal remedies to step in if and when things go awry. This formula is largely responsible for America’s ongoing economic and technological leadership around the world, and will be a necessary factor if we hope to sustain that leadership.
Beyond Louisiana’s legislature, its residents are embracing AI.The Pelican Institute has compiled a running list of AI achievements and news stories in our state. The ingenuity of our schools, hospitals, and businesses would be stifled under the AI “Bill of Rights” outlook. Lawmakers can learn from the mistakes of their predecessors and the triumphs of the free market to establish policies that avoid the cycle of preemptive regulation and instead leverage the power of innovation.
