AI Law Is No Longer Theoretical: What's Here, What's Coming, and What It Means
For the past few years, AI law has been one of those topics that felt perpetually five minutes away. Governments would announce frameworks. Committees would publish white papers. Experts would debate what the rules should eventually look like. That phase is over. In 2026, the legal infrastructure around AI is arriving, piece by piece, and not always in a coherent sequence. The EU has its Act. The US has fifty state governments moving in slightly different directions while Washington stalls on federal legislation. Courts in multiple jurisdictions are working through copyright cases with implications that will reshape the entire industry. And businesses deploying AI tools are discovering, sometimes the hard way, that “the AI did it” is not a defence that holds up in court. ...