South Carolina AI Legislation in 2026

The South Carolina Picture

South Carolina has not enacted a comprehensive, cross-sector AI law, and as of June 2026 it does not have one on the books or close to passage. What the state has done is narrow, criminal, and targeted. The two laws that actually carry the force of statute, Act 57 (S. 28) and Act 58 (S. 29), both signed on May 22, 2025, are squarely aimed at child protection. They are not AI governance frameworks in the mold of Colorado's algorithmic discrimination law or the EU AI Act. They are amendments to the criminal code that drag synthetic and morphed imagery into existing child sexual abuse statutes. The enacted law is about preventing harm to children, not about auditing models, disclosing training data, or registering high-risk systems.

What makes South Carolina's approach distinctive is the deliberate closing of the no-real-victim defense. Act 57 states in plain text that it is not a required element of the offense that the minor depicted actually exists, which means fully synthetic, prompt-generated imagery is criminalized even where no real child was photographed. Act 58 takes the complementary path, attaching liability to morphed images of an identifiable minor, meaning a real child whose recognizable likeness has been digitally altered into explicit content. Together these two acts cover both ends of the generative spectrum, the wholly invented image and the manipulated real photo, with serious felony penalties and sex offender registry consequences.

Outside of child protection, South Carolina remains permissive and largely unregulated. The election deepfake bill, H. 3517, has sat in House Judiciary since January 2025 with no movement, so South Carolina enters the 2026 cycle with no statute requiring disclosure of AI-generated political media. The broader consumer protection bill, S. 963, and the education and therapy bills are introduced but pending, and given the legislature's pace and the federal preemption pressure now circulating, builders should not assume any of them will become law in this session. The only governmentwide AI document is the Department of Administration's June 2024 Artificial Intelligence Strategy, which governs how state agencies adopt AI and does not bind private companies.

For builders, my guidance is direct. If your product can generate, edit, or store imagery, you must treat South Carolina as a strict-liability environment for any sexualized depiction of minors, real or synthetic, and you must engineer hard guardrails, detection, reporting pipelines, and a posture that assumes the it is not a real child argument has no legal value here. For everything else, AI hiring tools, chatbots, political content, biometric systems, you currently face no South Carolina-specific statutory compliance burden, but you should track S. 963 and H. 3517 closely because the gaps they target are exactly the ones a future session is most likely to fill.