As the use of artificial intelligence spreads to all corners of life, Alabama lawmakers are introducing bills to put a few limits on how Alabamians interact with AI.
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The bills touch on health care, content disclosures, age verification and deceptive content.
How are Alabamians using AI?
AI is everywhere. Web browsers now include AI assistants like Gemini, Google searches spit out aggregated results written up by AI and generative AI platforms read whole books and write essays in seconds. Like the country as a whole, lots of people in Alabama are using AI.
Because much of AI use is personal — like asking AI to make a dinner recipe out of what you have left in your pantry or removing a few people from the background of your vacation photos — it’s hard to say how many people are using it or how often.
But data shows AI usage is widespread in the private sector in Alabama.
Fifty-seven percent of small businesses in Alabama use an AI platform and 42% are using generative AI, according to a report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The public sector, including state government, has been slower to adopt the new technology, but employees are still using it.
Gov. Kay Ivey formed the Alabama AI Task Force in early 2024 to produce a report about how state agencies could best use generative AI to improve efficiency. The task force’s March 2025 report found that around 25% of state agencies were using generative AI at the time — mostly for text generation, translation, coding and problem solving.
This year’s patchwork of proposed legislation comes after the White House signed in December an executive order that limits states’ ability to regulate AI, instead establishing a national policy framework. States with “onerous” AI laws will be made ineligible to receive Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program funding, the order says. Alabama received $1.4 billion in BEAD funding in late 2024.
AI in health care
Health care is a major issue for this legislative session, and that includes how AI will affect medicine and health insurance.
Senate Bill 63 would prohibit health insurance companies from using exclusively artificial intelligence to make coverage determinations and require a human to make the final decision to deny or reduce coverage. It would also require the companies to disclose to subscribers if AI is being used in making decisions.
“We don’t want machines making the healthcare decisions, as far as their ability to get the healthcare that they need,” sponsor Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, said. “A human needs to be making the final decision to deny or reduce or delay some kind of procedure or pharma for an insured (person).”
Orr introduced a more comprehensive bill about prior authorizations last session, but it was never voted on in committee. Last year’s bill included a detail about how insurance companies can use AI.
Orr said this new bill is to require human oversight for important health care determinations that affect people’s everyday lives and to make sure that each Alabamian’s claim is evaluated individually.
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EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Claire Harrison and originally published by Alabama Daily News.
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