Illinois signs landmark AI safety law as states lead regulation push

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed SB 315, the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act, on July 6, placing the state at the center of a new state-led push to police frontier AI before Washington settles on a national rulebook. The measure cleared the Illinois Senate 52-5 and the House 110-0, and it makes Illinois the third state to regulate frontier AI models after New York and California.

The law is aimed at the largest AI developers, not the industry as a whole. It applies only to companies above a $500 million revenue threshold and tied to a large-compute benchmark. Those covered developers must adopt, publish and update every year a frontier AI framework covering catastrophic-risk assessment, mitigations, cybersecurity, internal governance, third-party evaluations and risks from internal use of frontier models.

Illinois also added disclosure requirements before major new releases. Covered developers must file transparency reports before deploying new or substantially modified frontier models and provide summaries of catastrophic-risk assessments. The statute includes whistleblower protections for covered employees and anti-retaliation language for workers who raise safety concerns inside their companies. The law does not take effect until 2028.

The Illinois Emergency Management Agency and Office of Homeland Security, working with the Office of the Illinois Attorney General, will administer reporting mechanisms, issue guidance and prepare annual reports. The bill also creates a consortium to develop ILCompute, a public cloud computing resource, and makes conforming changes to the state’s Freedom of Information Act.

Sponsors Sen. Mary Edly-Allen and Rep. Daniel Didech announced the measure on May 13. Edly-Allen compared the current AI environment to the “Wild, Wild West,” while Pritzker and House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch argued lawmakers should not repeat the slow response they had to social media. OpenAI and Anthropic backed the legislation during the process after amendments addressed concerns from Senate Republicans, Secure AI, Anthropic and the state emergency management agency.