AI Without an AI Act: A Practitioner's Guide to US Artificial Intelligence Governance

The United States does not have an AI Act. It has something more complex, more fragmented, and far less understood.AI Without an AI Act: A Practitioner's Guide to United States Artificial Intelligence Governance is a practitioner's guide to how the United States actually governs artificial intelligence: through agency enforcement, constitutional doctrine, litigation exposure, procurement conditions, voluntary standards frameworks, state legislation and contractual obligation. Together these layers create a governance environment that is simultaneously operationally demanding and structurally incoherent.Understanding US AI governance requires far more than knowing Congress has not passed a comprehensive federal AI law.Spanning 54 chapters and 22 reference appendices, this book provides a comprehensive, rigorously sourced account of US AI governance as it stands in June 2026, one of the most consequential periods in the field's development.Part I: FoundationsThe distributed governance model, its historical development and the constitutional constraints that make the American system structurally different from the European Union and Chinese approaches.Part II: Federal GovernanceThe federal enforcement architecture, including the FTC, SEC, CFPB, EEOC, FDA, DOJ, DOL, HHS, FCC, CISA, Department of Defense, Department of Commerce and the emerging international coordination frameworks shaping US policy.Part III: Sectoral GovernanceAI governance across financial services, healthcare, employment, insurance, defence, critical infrastructure, education, legal services and public-sector deployment.Part IV: State GovernanceThe state legislative surge, including detailed analysis of California, Colorado, Texas, New York and Illinois, alongside the federal-state preemption conflict reshaping the regulatory landscape in real time.Part V: Emerging AI GovernanceIntellectual property, competition law, open-source AI, frontier models, generative AI, agentic systems and operational runtime governance.Part VI: Strategic OutlookThe US enforcement coalition, litigation as governance, comparison with the EU and China, the governance gap, enterprise compliance strategy and the likely trajectory of AI governance through 2027.The 22 appendices, including obligation maps, enforcement case tables, state divergence matrices, sectoral governance tables, biometric AI laws by state and international agreements, function as a standalone practitioner reference.Who this book is forCompliance officers, AI governance leads, in-house counsel, policy professionals, government affairs teams, consultants advising on US market entry, regulators, researchers and postgraduate students in law, public policy and technology governance.About the AuthorAlexandra Carvalho is an AI governance researcher and practitioner specialising in AI regulation, data protection law and technology policy. Read more