North CarolinaAI regulation

Regulation Status

• North Carolina has not enacted a comprehensive AI statute; its AI-specific measures to date extend existing criminal law to synthetic content. House Bill 591 (Session Law 2024-53), effective 1 December 2024, is the state's principal AI-related enactment, amending both its child sexual abuse material statutes and its intimate-images statutes to cover material created, adapted, or modified by technological means such as algorithms or artificial intelligence.
• On child sexual abuse material, HB 591 expands the existing child pornography offenses so that digital or computer-generated visual depictions or representations produced or altered by AI fall within the prohibition, with the state's existing criminal penalties applying. On non-consensual intimate imagery, the same law extends the distribution prohibitions to AI-generated intimate images and criminalizes threats to disclose, or refusals to delete, a sexual private image in order to extort something of value, additional private images, or other compelled action.
• North Carolina's posture is narrow and criminal-law-focused rather than a broad developer or deployer governance regime; as of 2026 it has not adopted an omnibus AI framework comparable to those in Colorado, California, or Texas.