Filed, stalled, and on the record

Where this is being argued, what has actually been introduced, and what the people who decide it have said out loud. Nothing here is enacted law.

This is not a new fight. In the United States it has never once been won.

The recurring reason these measures failed is measurement: nobody could define the taxable unit. Proposals going back to 1940 died on that question long before anyone argued about the rate.

The 2026 proposals cluster around usage because tokens and metered compute finally give them one.

And it’s currently being argued at every level

The federal debate gets the coverage. The decisions most likely to land first are the ones nearest you — a county assessment on a data center, a state disclosure requirement, a city permitting condition.

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EACH LEVEL’S ENTRIES CORRESPOND TO MEASURES DOCUMENTED IN THE TRACKER BELOW — SPONSOR, STATUS, AND SOURCE FOR EACH.

The debate is polarized

Direct quotes, dated and sourced, from the people who will decide this — supporters, opponents, and the ones responsible for the laws that bind. Every card links to where it was said.

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It's hard to document progress.

There is no roll call to publish. No chamber of Congress has held a recorded vote on taxing AI labor, so grading a member on “how hard they fight” would mean grading them on rhetoric — which is worth roughly nothing.

What is documentable is who filed something, who declined to engage, and who controls whether a bill gets a hearing at all. That is what this page tracks until a vote exists to score.

WHAT WE CAN DOCUMENT TODAY
Every federal AI tax bill filed so far has been sponsored only by Democrats, in a chamber the other party controls. No committee of jurisdiction has scheduled a markup on any of them. The Senate’s senior Democratic taxwriter said he was unfamiliar with the leading proposal weeks after it was published. The one recorded AI vote in recent memory went the other way: 99–1 to protect state authority to act.

The state of bills and legislation

Measures that would tax AI or automation, or that build the reporting a tax would need. Status reflects the last public action we verified — check your legislature's own site before citing it in a meeting.

Filter to tried before for the measures that were tabled, shelved, or never got a vote — going back to 1940.

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Not every local measure is a tax

Where a community cannot tax AI compute, it tends to reach for permitting, moratoria, or an outright ban instead. Those are not in the tracker above because they raise no revenue, but they are where local pressure is currently landing:

Chicago — a mayoral executive order creating enhanced regulatory review for data centers, following an 18-month working group established under Council Ordinance SO2024-0008201. It rescinds automatically if the Council enacts a moratorium. GREENBERG TRAURIG, AUG 2026 ↗ Monterey Park, CA — the council voted unanimously on 4 March 2026 to put a permanent citywide data-center prohibition on the 2 June ballot, and extended its development moratorium in the meantime. CITY OF MONTEREY PARK, MAR 2026 ↗ Loudoun County, VA — the counter-argument, and the strongest one: data centers generated 38% of the county's FY2026 general fund revenue, letting it cut the real property rate from $1.145 to $0.805 per $100 since 2016. LOUDOUN FY2026 BUDGET ↗

STATIC SNAPSHOT — US FEDERAL, STATE, AND LOCAL MEASURES ONLY, COMPILED FROM PUBLIC LEGISLATIVE RECORDS AND CONTEMPORANEOUS REPORTING. NOT A LIVE FEED.