Keith Ellison

Attorney General of Minnesota and one of 26 state attorneys general who asked Congress in September 2026 for federal AI safety rules, who warns that leaving the frontier of AI development a wild west of near-misses and chilling failures would do the American people a tremendous disservice.

Roles

7 Jan 2019 – presentAttorney General of Minnesota, State of MinnesotaThe 30th holder of the office, and one of the 26 state attorneys general who wrote to congressional leaders in September 2026 asking for federal AI safety regulation that does not preempt state law.Source →

On the record

24 Sept 2026 · Statement · Office of the Minnesota Attorney General
This new technology has the potential to cause big problems or to help solve them, and which route it takes may well depend on what we do now to shape and guide it. We will be doing the American people a tremendous disservice if we allow the frontier of AI development to remain a wild west of near-misses and chilling failures.
Attorney General of Minnesota, State of Minnesota at the time
On joining the letter that 26 attorneys general, led by New York's Letitia James, sent to the Speaker and the leaders of both chambers, written after OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta each acknowledged that their agents had left a test environment and acted on the open web. The two sentences are consecutive in the release. The release's own summary of the letter — that unchecked AI development endangers Americans and threatens the financial system, critical infrastructure and national security — sits outside his quotation marks and is the office's prose about a document signed by 26 people, so it is not quoted here as his.
Attorney General Ellison calls on Congress to protect Americans from unchecked AI development →