Pritzker signs landmark AI regulation bill that aims to mitigate risks
[July 07, 2026]
By Maggie Dougherty
CHICAGO — Gov. JB Pritzker signed artificial intelligence legislation
modeled after similar bills in California and New York on Monday,
furthering a push for a state-driven national framework in lieu of
federal regulations.
“Congress and the president ought to be passing similar legislation, but
they’ve so far been unwilling, because many are captive to special
interests that profit from the industry having no regulation,” Pritzker
said before signing the bill. “We can work together to establish
thoughtful guardrails in ways that benefit both industry and the public,
or we can allow a handful of actors to evade accountability and push the
costs and detriment onto ordinary people. Illinois has chosen our path.”
Senate Bill 315, also known as the Artificial Intelligence Safety
Measures Act, increases transparency and accountability requirements for
the largest artificial intelligence models — those that generate more
than $500 million in annual revenue and are trained using massive
computing power.
The bill mirrors California’s SB-53 and New York’s Responsible AI Safety
and Education Act, which were each signed in late 2025. It establishes
new reporting standards for the possibility that the AI model could be
used for large-scale harms, such as by providing users assistance in
creating a chemical, biological or nuclear weapon or committing
cyber-attacks.
Senate sponsor Sen. Mary Edly-Allen, D-Libertyville, said there is an
urgency for states to protect against those potential harms.
“We are not willing to wait for Congress to act,” Edly-Allen said.
“There’s an old saying: Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach him
to fish, he eats for a lifetime. Teach AI to fish, though, and it might
just empty the whole river trying to figure out how.”
Though the three states only account for roughly 20% of the national
populus, lawmakers estimate that they represent roughly 40% of the U.S.
AI market, effectively creating a de facto national standard.
New guardrails
The new law requires model developers to publish an AI framework
outlining how the developer identifies and assesses “catastrophic risk,”
defined as the likelihood that incidents that could cause death or
serious injury to more than 50 people or more than $1 million in
property damage.
Developers will also be required to report any incidents that could
cause harm to the state within 72 hours of identifying the incident, or
24 hours if it poses an imminent risk for death or serious physical
injury.
The bill’s House sponsor, Rep. Daniel Didech, D-Buffalo Grove, said the
harms the bill will regulate are not theoretical.
“We have already seen the first AI-inspired mass shooting. We have
already seen AI systems utilized to attack a municipal water and
drainage utility,” Didech said.
He also alluded to the example of Anthropic’s Mythos model, which the
company said was too powerful a cyberweapon to release to the public.
Anthropic supported Illinois’ bill and had representatives present at
the signing on Monday.
“Every transformative technology in our history, from automobiles to
electricity to air travel, has delivered enormous benefits while
carrying real risks, and in every case the government responded not by
banning the technology and not by taking a hands-off approach, but by
building safeguards, so everyday people can trust that these
technologies are safe,” Didech said.
Illinois’ version, similar in most ways to the standards set in New York
and California, adds a first-in-the-nation requirement for mandatory
annual third-party audits; New York’s version only required a single
independent audit at the time when developers became large enough to
qualify under the law.
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Gov. JB Pritzker signs the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures
Act into law in Chicago on July 6, 2026, surrounded by lawmakers and
advocates. (Capitol News Illinois photo by Maggie Dougherty)
During debate in the General Assembly, the third-party audit provision
was a point of contention for some industry stakeholders, including
TechNet, a coalition of tech executives across the industry.
“We remain concerned that Illinois would effectively be requiring
private actors to make highly subjective determinations requiring AI
safety compliance without established national standards,
certifications, or clear regulatory guardrails,” TechNet representative
Ninia Linero said in committee May 20.
OpenAI and Anthropic both supported the bill on its path through the
Illinois General Assembly, and it passed with broad bipartisan support
in both chambers; only five Republican senators voted against it, and it
passed unanimously in the House.
Though the large developers pushed for a federal framework rather than
what they were concerned would be an inconsistent patchwork of state
regulations, Caitlin Niedermeyer of OpenAI’s Global Affairs told the
Senate’s AI and Social Media committee in April that OpenAI was open to
a coordinated state-driven approach.
“While we have been very clear that the federal government remains
well-positioned to lead on frontier safety because it has the resources,
expertise and institutions, we also strongly actually see a position for
both Illinois but also California and New York to really lead in
advancing aligned frameworks, which we believe can absolutely help
create a de facto national direction of travel,” Niedermeyer told the
committee.
What’s on the AI horizon?
Companies that violate it will be subject to civil penalties brought by
the attorney general’s office of up to $1 million for the first offense
and up to $3 million for subsequent violations.
But lawmakers and advocates say they expect to continue working on the
topic of AI in the future. For example, Didech identified medical care
and education as likely frontiers needing further evaluation of AI’s
public safety risks.
Scott Wisor, policy director for Secure AI, was one of the advocates
helping to shape Illinois’ bill. Having more external evaluation of the
risks the models pose, and make judgments on when they’re ready for
release, would be the next step for further transparency and
accountability, he said.
“Right now, the evaluation in this bill is, are you complying with your
safety framework? Because suppose you had a safety framework, just like,
‘We’re going to do A, B, C, and D,’ you do that, the evaluator confirms
it, and yet it’s still a risky thing to have out in the world,” Wisor
said.
“So, this is a huge step forward, but I think there’s more we can do,”
Wisor said.
Illinois’s law will take effect on Jan. 1, 2028.
Capitol News Illinois is
a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government
coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily
by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
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