Abstract
<p>State legislatures have become the primary venue for artificial intelligence (AI) poli-cymaking in the United States, but existing measures of state AI activity count billswithout distinguishing what those bills actually do. This research note introduces anew measure of the policy orientation of state AI legislation. Drawing on a corpus ofapproximately 1.45 million state bills, we identify 3,124 high-confidence AI bills usinga validated two-tier keyword system benchmarked against the National Conference ofState Legislatures’ AI legislation database. We then classify each bill as regulatory,promotional, or procedural using a large language model with human validation. Regu-latory bills dominate the agenda (61.7%), but one in four AI bills is purely procedural:task forces, studies, and reports that create no substantive policy. The measure sep-arates legislative activity from governance commitment and provides a resource forresearch on technology federalism, policy diffusion, and symbolic politics.</p>