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On July 16, roughly 200 delegates, including Nobel laureates and former heads of state and government, signed a declaration in Rome calling for broad global governance of artificial intelligence. Ten days earlier, in Chicago, Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a law requiring large frontier AI developers to submit to independent annual audits. Pritzker’s act received less fanfare—but it may ultimately matter more for the way AI risks are regulated around the world.

The Illinois law joins earlier legislation passed in California and New York that, together, will impact every major AI developer in the United States. Collectively, these laws require AI companies to publicly document how they manage catastrophic risk, report safety incidents to state authorities, and, with Illinois’s new legislation, open their safety frameworks to external scrutiny.

On July 16, roughly 200 delegates, including Nobel laureates and former heads of state and government, signed a declaration in Rome calling for broad global governance of artificial intelligence. Ten days earlier, in Chicago, Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a law requiring large frontier AI developers to submit to independent annual audits. Pritzker’s act received less fanfare—but it may ultimately matter more for the way AI risks are regulated around the world.

The Illinois law joins earlier legislation passed in California and New York that, together, will impact every major AI developer in the United States. Collectively, these laws require AI companies to publicly document how they manage catastrophic risk, report safety incidents to state authorities, and, with Illinois’s new legislation, open their safety frameworks to external scrutiny.

These efforts show that, even without any comprehensive federal statute or international agreement, U.S. states have the power to meaningfully regulate AI. Most frontier AI developers are headquartered in California, and California law applies to any company doing business there. As other states copy and strengthen Sacramento’s regulations, the rule sets will increasingly function as national, even in some respects international, standards. And they may prove more enforceable—and even more open to democratic pressure—than the global grand bargains experts call for.

The Rome Declaration is just one of many recent appeals for global AI governance. In his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV called for multilateral efforts to address AI. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres recently called for worldwide controls, and last week more than 1,000 employees at leading AI companies signed a letter urging Washington to lead an international effort to curb AI’s rapid development.

But global efforts to regulate AI face strong geopolitical headwinds. In 2024, the United States........

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