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ARIZONA STATE SENATE
Fifty-Seventh Legislature, Second Regular Session
artificial intelligence; content verification
Purpose
Requires providers of generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems to include provenance data in any media that is created or materially altered by the system.
Background
The federal National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020 (Act) codified the establishment of a national AI initiative and associated federal offices and committees. The Act directed the Secretary of Commerce, in coordination with other federal agencies, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Department of Energy and the Department of Homeland Security, to establish guidelines and best practices for developing safe, secure and trustworthy AI systems, with the aim of promoting consensus industry standards (15 U.S.C. § 9401 et seq).
Executive Order 14179 deems that it is the policy of the United States to sustain and enhance AI to promote economic competitiveness and national security. The Order directed various federal agencies and individuals to develop an AI action plan and identify actions taken pursuant to Executive Order 14110 that conflict with this policy (Exec. Order No. 14179). Executive Order 14365 deems that it is the policy of the United States to achieve a minimally burdensome national policy framework for AI. The Order directed the establishment of an AI Litigation Task Force for the purpose of evaluating and challenging state laws inconsistent with this policy and restricted funding to the states under the Broadband Equity Access and Development Program (Exec. Order 14365).
There is no anticipated fiscal impact to the state General Fund associated with this legislation.
Provisions
1. Requires a covered provider to include provenance data in any video, image or audio content, or any combination thereof, that is created or materially altered by the covered provider's generative AI system.
2. Defines covered provider as a person or entity that creates, codes or otherwise produces a generative AI system that is publicly accessible within the geographic boundaries of Arizona for personal use by consumers.
3. Requires a covered provider to use commercially and technically reasonable methods to make the provenance data difficult to remove or tamper with.
4. Stipulates that the above requirement may be satisfied with the use of a commonly supported technical standard for watermarking and metadata.
5. Stipulates that content is not considered materially altered if the alteration consists of a minor modification that does not lead to significant changes to the perceived content or meaning of the content.
6. Requires covered providers to include any information that relates to an identified or reasonably identifiable individual in provenance data that is included in content created or materially altered by the covered provider's generative AI system.
7. Defines generative AI system as technology that uses machine learning, including deep-learning models, natural language processing or other computational processing techniques of similar or greater complexity to generate images, audio, video or other media.
8. Defines minor modification to include changing brightness, contrast or color, sharpening, saturating, applying filters, resizing, scaling, cropping, format conversions, resampling, denoising and removing background noise in audio.
9. Defines provenance data as data that is embedded into digital content, that is included in the digital content's metadata or that is associated with digital content to verify the digital content's authenticity, origin or history of modification.
10. Contains a statement of legislative findings.
11. Becomes effective on the general effective date.
Prepared by Senate Research
February 16, 2026
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