State Republican leaders criticized the General Assembly session schedule and new taxes in this year’s budget. But they saw progress in their overall inclusion in budget talks, and also advanced several pieces of bipartisan legislation.

It was well past 4 a.m. Monday when the Illinois House of Representatives adjourned for the summer. The budget had been balanced, and a flurry of bills were sent to the governor’s desk. But a busy finish to the spring session left some of the biggest decisions until the very end.

According to a report earlier this year from the Guttmacher Institute, an organization that advocates for and researches abortion access, nearly a quarter of all people seeking an abortion outside the state where they live came to Illinois.

The bill is part of a larger package regulating AI and is modeled after legislation in California and New York as states seek to establish a national regulatory standard.

The eight bills tackle consumer protections, chatbot transparency and how AI can be used in schools. Lawmakers said the lack of federal policy was part of their motivation for introducing legislation, by banding together with other states to create a standard.

President Donald Trump directed the Commerce Department to explore whether the broadband funding could be withheld from states with artificial intelligence regulations that did not align with national policy.

The companies flooded the state’s Democratic primaries with millions of dollars to promote candidates they believed would have a light touch when it came to regulating technologies that have begun to upend how people do their jobs and manage their finances.

Gov. JB Pritzker has also proposed a two-year pause on state financial incentives for data centers that have been in place since 2019.

Illinois state legislators are proposing the Power Act, which would put guardrails around the rapid expansion of large-scale data centers.

The Citizens Utility Board is sounding the alarm on data centers’ growing demand on the electrical grid, saying Illinois consumers can expect higher electric bills.

In a reversal from previous years’ pollution reductions, the United States spewed 2.4% more heat-trapping gases from the burning of fossil fuels in 2025 than in the year before, researchers calculated in a study released Tuesday.

Illinois lawmakers responded to President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrant communities with new legal protections for students and guidelines for schools that will take effect Jan. 1. Lawmakers also focused on the use of AI in education.

The report found that Instacart uses AI to gauge how “price sensitive” customers are, meaning how much grocery stores can charge for an item before the shopper decides to not purchase it. That’s different from dynamic pricing, where prices instantly change depending on supply and demand.

The order calls on Attorney General Pam Bondi to establish an AI Litigation Task Force within 30 days to review state AI laws and sue those with regulations that undermine a national policy framework to promote “global AI dominance” for the United States.

U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis wrote the footnote in a 223-page opinion issued last week, noting that the practice of using ChatGPT to write use-of-force reports undermines agents’ credibility and “may explain the inaccuracy of these reports.”

While the study has its fair share of critics, it has raised alarms when it comes to the business benefits around a multi-billion-dollar advancement in the tech industry.