· ai regulation · 4 min read

Montana Passed a "Right to Compute" Law and I Am Delighted

SB 212 declares that Montanans have a constitutional right to own and use computational resources. It's a fascinating use of state constitutional property rights doctrine to preempt AI regulation — and it might actually work.

Photo by Taylor Vick on Unsplash

Montana passed a law in April 2025 declaring that their residents have a constitutional right to own and use computational resources. I’ll admit I wasn’t expecting to write that sentence, but here we are, and I think the legislature was onto something.

The Right to Compute Act — Senate Bill 212 — is short, principled, and interesting. It’s also the first state statute I’ve seen that uses constitutional property rights doctrine as an explicit defensive posture against future AI overregulation.

The Core Argument

Montana’s legislature found that:

“the rights to acquire, possess, and protect property under Article II, section 3, of the Montana constitution, and the freedom of expression under Article II, section 7, of the Montana constitution, also embody the notion of a fundamental right to own and make use of technological tools, including computational resources.”

And therefore:

“Any restrictions placed by the government on the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest.”

If that language sounds familiar, it should. “Demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest” is strict scrutiny. Montana just applied strict scrutiny to government restrictions on private compute.

What This Does Practically

The statute creates a framework for challenging state-level compute restrictions. If Montana’s legislature or a future governor tries to:

  • Restrict what AI models private citizens can run
  • Require registration of compute above a certain threshold
  • Limit training of certain model types on private hardware
  • Impose capability controls on privately-owned computing infrastructure

…any of those would have to survive strict scrutiny under this statute. That’s a very high bar. Most regulatory restrictions don’t survive it.

This is a preemptive move. It’s Montana saying: whatever the federal government decides to do, and whatever other states decide to do, we’re establishing now that our constitutional framework protects this activity.

The statute has a federal preemption carve-out — nothing in the law can preempt applicable federal law. So if Congress passes a federal compute regulation, Montana can’t use SB 212 to block it. The statute operates purely at the state level.

The Critical Infrastructure Piece

The law isn’t purely libertarian, though. It has a practical requirement for AI in critical infrastructure.

When critical infrastructure facilities are controlled in whole or in part by a “critical artificial intelligence system” — defined as an AI that makes or substantially factors into consequential decisions — the deployer must develop a risk management policy. The policy has to be reasonable and consistent with guidance in:

  • The NIST AI Risk Management Framework
  • ISO/IEC 42001 (the international AI management systems standard)
  • Or another nationally or internationally recognized AI risk management framework

A federal compliance plan satisfies this requirement. So if you’re already doing NIST RMF compliance for federal contracts, you’re covered in Montana.

The “critical infrastructure” scoping is important. Not every AI deployment triggers this — it’s specifically facilities where AI controls physical or operational infrastructure. Power grids, water systems, transportation. Not your SaaS HR tool.

The constitutional framing is what makes this interesting from a law perspective.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that economic regulations implicate liberty and property interests under the Fourteenth Amendment. State constitutions often provide even stronger protections — Montana’s Article II has property rights language that the legislature is now reading to cover computational resources.

Is that reading correct? I think it’s defensible. Computational resources are property. The right to use your property for lawful purposes is a classic liberty interest. Restricting what computations you can run on hardware you own is a restriction on property use. Under Montana’s constitution — which the Montana Supreme Court gets to interpret — that restriction triggers heightened scrutiny.

Whether courts will buy this argument at the state supreme court level is an open question. But the legislature made a deliberate choice to plant this flag, and litigants will use SB 212 to challenge future compute restrictions. That matters.

The Broader Signal

The Right to Compute Act is part of a pattern. Several states are positioning themselves as compute-friendly, AI-friendly jurisdictions — deliberately creating legal environments that attract AI development and data center investment.

Montana has cheap land, cheap power, and now a constitutional framework that’s explicitly hostile to compute restrictions. Wyoming is doing something similar with crypto and blockchain. Utah has been aggressive about AI-friendly regulatory sandboxes.

This is states competing for a new category of economic activity. The federal government is slow. State-level policy is where the action is right now.

The law is smart and worth watching. Montana’s Supreme Court will eventually have to decide whether the constitutional right-to-compute framing holds up — and that decision will matter far beyond state lines.

I hope it does hold up. The alternative — governments deciding what computations are permitted — is a very bad road.

You can find the original text of Montana SB 212 on the Montana Legislature’s website.

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