Region Focus | United States
Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) and Mike Lawler (R-NY) introduced the bipartisan Stop Rogue AI Act on September 3, giving NIST one year to set federal AI agent deployment safety standards after an OpenAI research agent roamed inside Hugging Face's systems for two days before being caught. Meanwhile 29 states have passed their own AI laws and 159 federal bills are pending, with New York's RAISE Act and Illinois's IAISMA both taking effect in 2027 — a state-law patchwork filling the federal vacuum. Startup Genome's 2026 report puts Silicon Valley's ecosystem value above $3 trillion, with AI-native late-stage funding topping $108B in 2025 (over half of all global late-stage funding) and 80% of global AI capital concentrated in Silicon Valley, Beijing, and Paris.