South Dakota AI Legislation in 2026

The South Dakota Picture

South Dakota is one of the most light-touch AI jurisdictions in the country, and as of June 2026 it has no comprehensive artificial intelligence statute. What exists is narrow and harm-specific rather than systemic. The state has acted in exactly two places: synthetic child sexual abuse material, addressed by SB 79 in 2024, and election deepfakes, addressed by SB 164 in 2025. Both are enacted and in force. Outside those two lanes, there is no general obligation on private companies to disclose AI use, no algorithmic discrimination regime, no high-risk system framework, and no consumer-facing AI transparency mandate. If you are building or deploying AI in South Dakota, treat the regulatory floor as federal law plus these two targeted prohibitions.

My read is that this reflects a deliberate posture rather than an oversight. South Dakota's approach is to criminalize clearly recognized harms and otherwise leave AI development unregulated, which the state pairs with an aggressively pro-growth stance on the underlying infrastructure such as data centers. The only government-wide AI policy is administrative, not legislative. The Bureau of Information and Telecommunications has published generative AI guidelines for state employees, but that document governs how the state itself uses AI internally. It does not impose duties on businesses and it does not carry the force of a statute.

For builders, the compliance picture is therefore short but real. First, any model or product capable of generating images or video of minors must be engineered and governed so it cannot be used to produce computer-generated or AI-generated CSAM, because SB 79 sweeps synthetic and deepfake material into South Dakota's child pornography offenses with mandatory minimums. Second, if your tooling can produce realistic synthetic depictions of real people, you need guardrails and clear provenance disclosures around political and election content, since SB 164 makes unlabeled, intent-to-injure deepfakes of candidates a crime within 90 days of an election, while offering a safe harbor for clearly labeled synthetic media.

My recommendation is to operate to a higher internal standard than South Dakota strictly requires. Because the state is light-touch today, the cost of compliance here is low, but companies that sell or operate across state lines will already be meeting stricter regimes elsewhere, and aligning to those higher bars makes you durable if South Dakota expands its framework in a future session. Watch the legislative session each January through March and verify any new bill directly on the official legislature site before treating it as law.