In this report — our third 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 last year’s legislative sessions and review key legislative and litigation developments in state tech policy during 2024. Our analysis revealed eight key findings:
1. The year of emboldened states. This year 46 states, every one that had a legislative session, passed 238 new pieces of technology regulation across eight categories, a 163 percent increase from last year. While we expected states to be cautious given legal challenges, the possibility of federal preemption, and the need to conduct impact assessments, states enacted significantly more laws regulating technology in 2024 than in previous years, emphasizing that states continue to lead the development of technology policy in the U.S.
2. Peak trifecta control? In 2024, 40 states had trifecta governments, the highest number in generations. As in previous years, trifecta governments correlated to the passage of tech reform; this year, 89 percent of tech laws were enacted in states with trifectas. In the 2024 election, at least two states lost their trifectas. As a result, there will be 38 trifectas in the 2025 legislative session.
3. An explosion of state laws on AI. AI continued to be a central priority for state legislators, who passed more than 100 laws. States enacted a series of issue-specific bills related to non-consensual sexual imagery, political deepfakes, and copyright protections. Colorado passed a comprehensive AI bill, but other efforts to pass more encompassing AI legislation failed in states like California and Connecticut.
4. Child online safety, come hell or high water (or the courts). Amid strong legal pushback, states moved forward with a range of new child online safety regulations: imposing design restrictions, requiring age verification, and burnishing parental rights to control their children’s online activities.
5. An emerging national standard for privacy. The Washington Privacy Act continued its progression toward becoming a national standard in comprehensive privacy regulation.
6. Tax breaks for data centers. Despite growing concern about environmental impact and energy use, states continued to establish and extend tax incentives for data centers.
7. Crypto, a slow burn. Without regulatory clarity at the federal level, states passed new legislation regulating the crypto industry, covering a range of issues; including mining, commercial codes, and centralized digital currencies.
8. Content moderation on hold. With the constitutionality of state content moderation policies being actively litigated in federal courts, states largely avoided passing general content moderation policy, focusing on specific moderation areas related to AI and child online safety.
For each of the last three years, we have seen states increase the scope and quantity of state regulation. This year, facilitated by a historic level of single-party control, we saw states disregard legal challenges and push forward on broad and narrow tech policy even given the possibility of preemption from federal legislation. States enacted laws dealing with topics ranging from deepfakes to age verification to genetic data privacy to crypto mining. Figure 3 shows the number of laws passed in each of the eight topics we cover; Figure 4 breaks down the number of enacted laws by state. Figure A in the appendix lists every technology bill that we tracked. While federal law may one day pre-empt some of these laws, states have taken the lead in building the frameworks that will regulate the technology sector in these areas.
Based on our analysis, we also look ahead to the upcoming legislative sessions to ask: How will states approach technology policy in 2025? 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.