Methodology

The published reference follows four editorial practices:

1. Primary-source citations. Every law and every bill carries at least one primary source — an ILGA bill-status page, the full bill text, or the signed Public Act — visible on the page and dated with the day it was retrieved.
2. Record-based totals. The displayed law and bill counts are calculated from the records included in this reference. They are counts of this selected collection, not of every Illinois AI measure.
3. Plain-English analysis. Each statute is explained with the same template — what it requires, who is covered, what the exposure is, and the key dates.
4. Dated review. The site shows a publication-update date, individual records show verification dates, and the changelog records material revisions. These dates have different meanings.

This reference is a curated selection of enacted Illinois AI statutes and bills from the 104th General Assembly. It includes substantive proposals and a few related technical measures relevant to the map's themes, including bills that have stalled. It is not a complete inventory of every AI-related bill or a statement of all applicable law.

What it deliberately does not track, because these deserve their own treatment and a different sourcing discipline:

• Agency rules and guidance (for example, IDHR's rulemaking under PA 103-0804 or ISBE's guidance under PA 104-0399), where much of the operative enforcement detail is actually set.
• Court cases and Attorney General opinions, which will define these statutes in ways the text does not.
• Federal action and preemption questions, noted where they bear on an Illinois law but not tracked as records.

Analyst notes interpret the significance of a bill separately from its procedural record. A proposal does not create an operative duty unless enacted; each bill's status and action history should be checked against its linked ILGA record.

Each law and bill included in this selection carries at least one primary source — the Illinois General Assembly bill-status page, the full bill text, or the signed Public Act — dated with the day it was retrieved. Derived figures trace to a statute or to a computation over this dataset.

The Illinois General Assembly (ilga.gov) is the canonical source. For each record, the authoritative reference is the ILGA bill-status page, the full bill text, or the signed Public Act PDF — linked directly, with the date it was retrieved. Where a Public Act number is not yet confirmed, the record says so rather than assert one.

Each source is labelled by type — Public Act, Bill status, Bill text, or Compiled Statutes — followed by its publisher, host, and the date it was retrieved. A “retrieved” date records when that source was consulted. “Status checked” on a bill records its latest ILGA procedural check; “entry updated” records an editorial revision and does not imply that every substantive provision was revalidated. The linked primary source governs if it differs from this summary. A proposed effective date appears only when the bill text expressly states one; an omitted date does not predict when a future law would take effect.

The review workflow calls for checks against ILGA after major legislative milestones, including committee and floor deadlines, adjournment, and gubernatorial action. A scheduled check is not the same as a completed verification.

The footer's September 23, 2026 date marks the latest published site update; it does not mean every record was rechecked that day. Selected bill statuses were checked on September 23, 2026; the law section was last updated on July 31, 2026. Individual records show their own source and update dates, which may be earlier than a section update. Material revisions appear in the changelog.

Bill status

Law status

Sectors

The controlled vocabulary of 7 sectors — Healthcare, Employment, IP / Creative, Education, Criminal / Child Safety, Consumer Protection, Frontier AI — is the closed set every enacted law is tagged against. The sector count on the site is the length of this list, which is why it cannot drift out of step with the laws it describes.

Regulatory vectors

A vector is a thematic grouping — a hypothesis about the regulatory aim a set of bills shares. The 6 vectors are an analytic lens, not a fact of any statute. They were drawn by reading each bill's text and mechanism, and a bill may sit in more than one. They are argued for, and revisable.

1. 01 Frontier Model & Systemic Risk. Competing frameworks target the developers of the largest AI models — mandating safety frameworks, incident reporting to the Attorney General, and civil penalties for noncompliance. Includes creation of ILCompute, a public cloud computing resource.
2. 02 Algorithmic Discrimination & Consumer Civil Rights. Extends anti-discrimination protections beyond employment into housing, credit, and public accommodations. Bans surveillance-based dynamic pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination.
3. 03 Transparency, Provenance & Disclosure. Mandates digital watermarking on all AI-generated media, professional disclosure requirements, strict synthetic content labels in political advertising, and consumer notification when interacting with AI systems.
4. 04 Companion AI & Minor Protection. First-of-its-kind regulation of emotionally adaptive AI companions. Requires crisis intervention protocols, persistent machine-disclosure, parental consent for minors, and suicide/self-harm detection.
5. 05 Data Privacy, Neuro-Data & Model Training. Institutes default opt-out for AI model training on user data. Creates comprehensive data broker registry. Extends privacy protections to neural and biometric data from consumer devices.
6. 06 Public Sector & Human-in-the-Loop. Prohibits public agencies from deploying automated decision systems without meaningful human review. Bans AI in teacher evaluations. Creates state AI governance task force and frameworks for state procurement of AI.

If a figure looks wrong, a status is stale, or a source has moved, contact Techné AI with a correction. Each bill and law page links to the primary records used for its published summary.