By Hank Stephenson, Adi Jagannathan | Arizona Agenda
When the House’s newly created Artificial Intelligence and Innovation Committee held its first meeting last week, instead of jumping straight into bills or worst-case scenarios, legislators did something rarer: They admitted they’re still learning.
Republican Rep. Justin Wilmeth, the chair of the new committee, set the tone, saying AI isn’t like most policy areas where issues mature over years — it’ll be a rapid-fire learning session where lawmakers have to deal with not only what happened yesterday, but what’s coming tomorrow.
“There are issues and other topics and other categories and committees that are there and they simmer and they go through a couple years and then you tackle them,” he told his fellow committee members. “But with this committee, every year we meet, we’re going to be dealing with stuff that didn’t exist last session.”
That speed, more than any single application, is what makes AI hard to govern.
Arizona is only the third state to form a dedicated AI committee. That doesn’t guarantee leadership — but it does mean the state is choosing to engage early, before the rules harden elsewhere.
Today, the committee will hear its first pair of the 16 bills that have already been assigned to it — one regulating deepfake porn that depicts real people, and the other mandating state agencies identify opportunities to use AI and review or eliminate regulations that “unnecessarily restrict” AI innovation.
