AUSTIN, Texas — Nathan Johnson, the Democratic nominee for Texas Attorney General, today released “Catching Up To Yesterday,” his 30-day plan to ensure that Texas law can protect people and markets from misuse and abuse of AI. AI now affects what Texans pay at the store, whether they get hired and what they earn, and how they can be scammed. Johnson wants to ensure that the law enables the Attorney General’s office and local law enforcement to respond.
“Existing laws were drafted to protect us from actions directed by people, not by algorithms, not by AI. But predatory practices are predatory, no matter what’s driving them, and older laws can fall short of what’s needed in order to protect us from new, technologically advanced forms of predatory conduct. AI is now setting rent, sorting resumes, rigging prices, and placing scammy phone calls that can empty a savings account. The need to update our laws is profound and urgent,” said Johnson.
A 30-Day Audit: Johnson’s plan opens with a systematic audit of existing consumer protection, fair competition, and employment laws to determine where the law falls short of what’s needed to protect vulnerable people from crime, consumers from predatory business practices, markets from manipulation, and workers from exploitation. The audit will yield a specific list of recommendations for the Legislature rather than a general call for regulation.
As part of the plan, Johnson provides examples showing that recent additions to Texas law concerning AI rely for enforcement primarily on the Attorney General’s office.
The Texas Responsible AI Governance Act (TRAIGA), which imposes an intent-based liability standard onto specific harmful AI practices.
SB 2373, an AI scam protection law that Johnson authored, authorizes the Attorney General to impose civil penalties against bad actors, and escalates the underlying conduct to a felony once losses cross $150,000.
SB 1188, a companion AI law covering health records, gives the Attorney General injunctive and civil penalty power over medical providers who misuse AI diagnostic tools or store patient data offshore, with penalties reaching $250,000 for intentional misuse.
Johnson also provides examples of places where Texas law falls short of being able to confront potential harms of unethical use of AI:
Employment. Although TRAIGA bars discriminatory use of AI in hiring and firing decisions, it does not address the predatory use of AI to unethically manipulate wage bargaining, nor does it require private employers to disclose when AI helped decide who or which position gets terminated.
Price fixing. For the past several years, lawsuits against price fixing via the use of algorithms, as in the RealPage cases, have wound their way through the courts, led by state attorneys general. Many millions of dollars have been spent litigating how the law applies where a group of dominant market participants all voluntarily funnel their proprietary pricing information into an algorithm and then share the results. Attorneys general should continue to press forward with litigation to resolve these questions. But they should also call upon legislatures to make clear policy decisions to foreclose any doubt as to whether anticompetitive practices may escape the law by resorting to new technological abilities.
Moving the Law Forward as Trump Guts Consumer Protections: On June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that the President may fire Federal Trade Commission commissioners at will, overruling a 91-year-old precedent and handing the White House authority over roughly two dozen agencies Congress built to operate independently. As a result, the country’s principal enforcer against price manipulation and scams now answers to the President rather than to the law, and every AI-driven case it might have brought becomes a case only a state attorney general will bring.
The federal abdication of consumer protection is where Texas can lead. Johnson’s plan proposes that the OAG’s Consumer Protection Division produce a biannual report on technological advances and marketplace changes that create new vulnerabilities for consumers, employees, and markets, facilitating legislative efforts to keep pace with change.
Read Johnson’s full plan here.
###