After His 17-Year-Old Son's Death, a South Carolina Lawmaker Is Taking Sextortion and AI to the States

A South Carolina Republican turned his 17-year-old son's 2022 death into the state's first felony law against online sextortion. Three years later, state Rep. Brandon Guffey is shopping that law to other states, and he met this month with the lawmakers who might carry it.

The venue was Future Summit 2026, a two-day gathering of Gen Z and millennial state legislators hosted in Washington on July 10 and 11 by Future Caucus, a bipartisan group of younger state lawmakers. The conference, by itself, is the kind of event the wire treats as a curiosity: a roomful of young politicians agreeing on children's online safety. The story that survives the wire is the structural one. Future Caucus runs a National Task Force on State AI Policy, and the summit is part of a sustained pipeline that turns a one-off conference into a recurring state-level rulemaking operation on AI and online safety.

Gavin's Law made "sextortion," the use of explicit content to blackmail a victim, a felony in South Carolina in 2023. It is named for Gavin Guffey, who died in 2022 after being extorted online, and it is the pipeline's first enacted product. At the summit, Guffey described the law as a set of "guardrails" rather than a device ban, the line he has used to push back against proposals that would require age verification or restrict minors' accounts outright. "We cannot keep kids (offline) right now," Guffey said, arguing that states should hold platforms responsible for the content minors can see rather than try to keep minors off the platforms, according to a Fort Mill Sun report.

The second active thread is an Ohio bill, not yet introduced, that would require AI developers to build models around mental health frameworks. State Rep. Christine Cockley, an Ohio Democrat, is co-drafting it with a Republican colleague whose name has not been released. Cockley tied the bill to reports that chatbots helped minors draft suicide notes and encouraged self-harm, and said she is "sick of hearing" those cases. The bill is the pipeline's stress test: a young-lawmaker pair from a non-coastal state writing rules that touch frontier-model behavior, with no bill number, no public draft, and no named legislative sponsor, the Fort Mill Sun reported.

Tomicah Tilleman called consumer tech "addictive" and built on user data monetization, and told lawmakers to "take a hard look at the structures" rather than chase individual harms. The harms Guffey and Cockley are responding to are downstream of a platform business model, and a state-level guardrail does not touch that model on its own, Tilleman argued in the same Fort Mill Sun report.

Future Caucus's National Task Force on State AI Policy is the named operation, and its page describes the group's intent to coordinate state-level AI rulemaking across the lawmakers in its network. That is what separates this conference from the dozens of bipartisan AI panels that have run for years: a written, organizer-backed task force with a public product (Gavin's Law) and a named, organizer-backed next project (the Ohio bill).

The pipeline will be tested by two falsifiers. Gavin's Law has to spread: another state needs to file a similar bill, or the "model legislation" label collapses back to a single statute. The Ohio AI mental-health-framework bill has to be introduced, with a number, a co-sponsor, and a committee referral, or the pipeline's most novel product never leaves the drafting stage. Until then, Future Summit 2026 is a conference with a working webpage and a small set of named bills, not the next phase of state AI rulemaking.

Cockley's "sick of hearing" line is what a legislator sounds like when she has run out of patience and started drafting. The pipeline's value will be measured by whether she and the rest of the task force can keep that volume long enough to move bills, not panels.