Maryland Drafts State AI Rules to Protect Workers and Kids
With Congress deadlocked on AI law, Maryland's governor is pushing a state framework covering worker protections, child safety, and security at sensitive sites.
What happened: Maryland Gov. Wes Moore's administration has laid out a framework for regulating artificial intelligence in the state, moving ahead while Congress remains stalled on a national AI law. The plan centers on keeping humans in control of AI decisions, protecting workers, and shielding children from harm. It also flags security concerns at sensitive sites: the National Institutes of Health, the Naval Academy, Fort Meade, and public schools. A new state AI sub-cabinet is now tasked with turning these priorities into actual bills ahead of the next legislative session.
Why it matters: With no federal AI law in place, states are increasingly writing their own rules, and Maryland's version leans toward protecting people already feeling the effects: workers worried about being displaced, families worried about kids interacting with chatbots, and institutions worried about AI misuse at high-security facilities. Moore has framed the risk not as falling behind other countries in an AI race, but as deploying a technology that outpaces human oversight.
How it works, plainly: The sub-cabinet's to-do list includes drafting legislation to regulate AI model companies operating in the state, creating a right-of-publicity law so people's likenesses can't be used by AI without consent, tackling AI systems that discriminate in housing decisions, and working with the attorney general's office to restrict chatbots built to be addictive. The administration is also consulting labor unions to shape worker-protection provisions before anything becomes law.
The rollout: Nothing here is law yet. These are recommendations that the governor's office plans to bring to state lawmakers ahead of the next legislative session, meaning the real test comes when specific bills are drafted, debated, and possibly amended or blocked. Moore pushed back on the idea that regulation weakens U.S. competitiveness against China, calling for a balance between cooperating and competing with other states and countries on AI oversight.