Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Gov. Wes Moore’s office posted a new policy document this week called “AI Principles,” a framework promising to protect Marylanders from artificial intelligence while positioning the state, and the governor, as a national leader on the issue. It appeared on the governor’s website just over two weeks after Moore told a Baltimore television reporter what he really thinks about the technology.
“I think there is a reason for people to be concerned,” Moore said in a Sept. 4 interview with Spotlight on Maryland, when asked about the anxiety AI is causing Maryland workers.
The document itself is a mix of things Maryland has already done and things the administration wants the General Assembly to do next. It also arrives at an awkward moment. Moore spent early September dodging questions about whether he’ll ask Marylanders for more money next year, after already signing roughly $1.6 billion in new taxes and fees in 2025.
“The document itself is a mix of things Maryland has already done and things the administration wants the General Assembly to do next.”
What the state is already doing
Maryland has built out a fair amount of AI infrastructure since 2024, and the new document leans on it heavily. Among the highlights:
- A 2024 executive order and the Artificial Intelligence Governance Act require state agencies to inventory their own AI use, and Maryland keeps a public list of where it’s using the technology.
- The Maryland Artificial Intelligence & Synthetic Media Threats Task Force investigates AI-related crimes and deepfakes, something the administration says makes Maryland close to unique among states.
- Lawmakers passed an election deepfake law this year, and separately expanded the state’s revenge-porn statute in 2025 to cover AI-generated intimate images and extended identity-fraud law this year to cover AI impersonation.
- The Maryland Kids Code, passed in 2024, requires platforms likely to be used by children to default to the strongest privacy settings and bars “dark pattern” design aimed at kids.
- Maryland was part of the multistate settlement with Meta over Instagram and Facebook’s effects on children. The national deal is worth up to $17.1 billion; Maryland’s cut is up to $327 million spread over ten years, according to Attorney General Anthony Brown’s office.
- The administration has also been moving fast on its own AI adoption. Moore announced a partnership with Anthropic and Percepta to build AI into parts of the state workforce, including benefits delivery and housing permitting, and the state stood up an AI Innovation Lab inside the Department of Information Technology for agencies to test new tools.
That’s a real list, and MDBayNews isn’t going to pretend otherwise. The disagreement is with what comes next.
The expansion
The “Moving forward” half of the document reads like a to-do list for a bigger state government. The administration says it wants to:
- Have the AI Subcabinet develop legislative recommendations regulating “frontier AI model companies,” including safety testing, independent audits, whistleblower protections and a 72-hour incident-reporting requirement.
- Create a new, standalone Statewide Labor-Management Committee giving unions representing state employees a formal seat at the table on AI policy.
- Establish a brand-new statutory “Right of Publicity,” making a Marylander’s likeness a property right that outlives them, with no need to prove the likeness carries commercial value to sue over its use.
- Direct the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights and the Department of Labor to issue “coordinated guidance” on how existing discrimination law applies to AI-driven employment decisions.
- Push the legislature to ban landlords from using shared pricing platforms to coordinate rents, and to restrict how gambling companies can target people showing signs of a gambling problem.
- Require a crisis protocol for chatbots that field questions about suicide or show signs of a user in mental health distress, plus new friction-based warnings for users under 16.
“Taken together, this is a governor tasking the existing AI Subcabinet with drafting a new regulatory framework while the state still can’t say how many Maryland jobs are actually at risk.”
Some of those ideas have obvious appeal on their own. Nobody is going to organize a rally in favor of algorithmic rent collusion. But taken together, this is a governor tasking the existing AI Subcabinet with drafting a new regulatory framework, standing up a new labor committee, creating a new category of property right and adding new restrictions on landlords and gambling operators, in the same document that admits the state still can’t say how many Maryland jobs are actually at risk.
Asked directly by Spotlight on Maryland’s Gary Collins earlier this month what his administration would do if AI began eliminating Maryland jobs, Moore didn’t name a threshold, a plan or a number. He talked broadly about the need for guardrails and community input.
The math problem sitting next to it
“A preliminary analysis from Moore’s own Innovation Team found that 39.6% of Maryland employment is in occupations it classifies as facing high AI automation risk.”
The AI framework isn’t happening in a vacuum. Earlier this month, Moore stood at the Maryland State Fair and declined, twice, to rule out new taxes or fees in the 2027 legislative session. That follows a 2025 budget that already raised vehicle registration and title fees, added a $5-per-tire fee, raised cannabis, vaping and cigarette taxes, increased the excise tax on vehicles over $50,000, added new surcharges on electric and hybrid vehicles, and created a new tax on information technology and data services. That IT tax, notably, has fallen well short of what the state expected to collect from it.
State budget analysts aren’t expecting relief. The Spending Affordability Committee’s own projections show a shortfall of roughly $1.2 billion for fiscal 2027, growing to about $2.7 billion in fiscal 2028, $3 billion in 2029 and $3.7 billion by 2030, with a significant share of that growth tied to the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future education program.
A preliminary analysis by the Maryland State Innovation Team, an internal team inside Moore’s own office launched with Bloomberg Philanthropies, found that 39.6% of Maryland employment is in occupations it classifies as facing high AI automation risk, the highest share of any state the project analyzed. The team itself calls the finding preliminary and says it doesn’t reflect the administration’s position, and it measures whether AI could perform job tasks, not whether employers will actually cut positions. Still, it’s notable that the number came from the governor’s own shop. It’s the kind of finding that ought to sober up a state government about to build out a whole new layer of AI bureaucracy rather than lean into cutting the ones it already has.
“It’s the kind of finding that ought to sober up a state government about to build out a whole new layer of AI bureaucracy.”
The bigger stage
None of this is happening while Moore keeps a low profile. He took over as chair of the National Governors Association on Aug. 1, the seventh Maryland governor to hold the post since 1908 and the first since Larry Hogan in 2019-20. The AI framework says explicitly that Maryland’s frontier-AI recommendations “will be shared with the National Governors Association,” and Maryland is one of four states working with RAISE US, a national workforce organization that partnered with the NGA this summer on AI-era job transitions. A separate NGA working group on AI and the future of work, which predates Moore’s chairmanship by about seven months, is set to publish its own roadmap for governors in November.
Moore, 47, continues to be widely discussed as a potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender, though he has repeatedly and publicly said he isn’t running, telling the AP as he took the NGA gavel in August that he won’t “get distracted” before this November’s elections. An AI policy rollout that doubles as a pitch to a national audience of fellow governors fits a pattern that’s become familiar this year: high-profile national positioning paired with unresolved questions at home about the budget, the workforce and, now, artificial intelligence.
What to Watch
“Whether an ambitious new AI regulatory push survives contact with that budget fight is worth watching into the new year.”
The frontier-AI legislation, the Right of Publicity bill and the chatbot and rent-collusion proposals will need the General Assembly’s sign-off when lawmakers return to Annapolis in January, the same session where they’ll confront a projected fiscal 2028 structural deficit approaching $2.7 billion. Whether an ambitious new AI regulatory push survives contact with that budget fight, and whether Moore answers the jobs question any more directly than he has so far, are worth watching into the new year.
Sources: This article draws on Gov. Wes Moore’s official “AI Principles” framework published on governor.maryland.gov (updated Sept. 21, 2026); WJLA/Spotlight on Maryland reporting by Gary Collins, “Wes Moore says Marylanders have reason ‘to be concerned’ about AI” (Sept. 9-10, 2026) and “After $1.6B tax, fee increase, Wes Moore won’t rule out more hikes next year” (Sept. 8-9, 2026); the Office of Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown’s August 2026 announcement on the Meta settlement; the Maryland State Innovation Team’s public team page and its GitHub-published workforce automation analysis; the National Governors Association’s “AI and the Future of Work” project page; and the Associated Press’s Aug. 1, 2026 coverage of Moore’s National Governors Association chairmanship, including his on-the-record comments on 2028. A search of MDBayNews’s archives found no prior coverage of this specific AI Principles document.
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