On July 6, 2026, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed Senate Bill 315, the Artificial Intelligence Safety Measures Act, making Illinois the third US state after California and New York to enact comprehensive safety and transparency requirements for developers of the largest AI systems. The governor’s office billed it as a nation-leading framework for AI safety, transparency, and accountability, with Pritzker saying that “states have a responsibility to protect our people from the dangers of AI while still harnessing the unique potential of the technology.”
The law’s headline feature is a national first: covered developers must retain independent third parties to audit their safety practices on an annual basis, with summarized and appropriately redacted audit reports published and shared with the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and Office of Homeland Security and the Illinois Attorney General. Prior state frontier AI laws relied on self-published safety frameworks; Illinois is the first to require that outside experts without financial conflicts of interest verify compliance.
Beyond audits, the Act requires large frontier developers, generally those with annual gross revenues above 500 million dollars, to create, implement, publish, and annually update a frontier AI framework covering catastrophic-risk assessment, mitigations, governance, cybersecurity, and third-party evaluations. Developers must publish transparency reports before deploying new or substantially modified frontier models, report critical safety incidents, and maintain confidential reporting channels with whistleblower protections for employees who raise safety concerns. Reported civil penalties reach 1 million dollars for a first violation and 3 million dollars for subsequent ones.
The law takes effect January 1, 2027, with the audit requirement phasing in from 2028. Sponsored by State Senator Mary Edly-Allen and State Representative Daniel Didech, the Act deepens the growing patchwork of state-level frontier AI regulation in the United States and raises the compliance bar set by California’s SB 53, a dynamic that continues to fuel the federal preemption debate.