The accumulated patchwork of AI-related regulations across federal agencies, state legislatures, and the bilateral coordination structures that have emerged in parallel has reached a level of complexity that is producing more compliance friction than substantive protection. The next phase of the regulatory work should focus on coherence rather than on additional substantive rules.

What the patchwork looks like

The patchwork includes federal agency-specific guidance from at least seven agencies, state-level regulatory frameworks in fifteen states (with substantial variation in scope and structure), a growing body of executive-branch policy direction, and the bilateral coordination structures that have emerged from international engagement.

Each piece of the patchwork has its own logic and its own constituency. The aggregate effect is a compliance landscape that even sophisticated operators have difficulty navigating, with the predictable consequences for innovation pace, for the comparative competitiveness of American operators, and for the practical efficacy of the protections the rules are intended to provide.

What coherence would look like

Coherence would not require adopting any particular substantive position on the more contested AI policy questions. It would require harmonising the procedural, definitional, and reporting frameworks across the existing rules in ways that allow operators to comply with one well-designed framework rather than with the partial overlap of many.

What does not need to be added

What does not need to be added to the existing patchwork is additional substantive rules. The existing rules cover most of the categories of risk that contemporary AI deployment raises; the gaps are smaller than the rate of new rule-making implies.

The political reality

The political reality is that coherence work is operationally less rewarding than substantive new rule-making. New substantive rules produce visible policy moments; coherence work produces less visible operational improvements. The incentive structure favours the new substantive rules.

The recommendation

This board recommends that the next phase of the federal AI policy work focus on harmonisation across the existing rules, that the relevant agencies coordinate to identify the most consequential redundancies and conflicts in the current framework, and that the operational priority shift from new rule-making to better implementation of the rules already on the books.