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Inside Delaware's 30-Month Sandbox: How the First AI-Run Companies Will Be Regulated
aic.inc team · July 25, 2026 · 4 min read
The most interesting thing about Delaware's proposed Artificial Intelligence Company isn't the entity. It's the container it ships in. The draft act doesn't simply add a new form to Title 6 and hope for the best. It builds a regulatory sandbox: a 30-month supervised testing ground where the state can watch autonomous businesses operate before deciding what permanent law should say.
Here's how the machinery works, per the June 2026 draft and public reporting.
Getting in
Sandbox admission is not a filing. It's an application, decided by an oversight committee with unusually heavy membership:
- Delaware's Secretary of State
- The Attorney General
- The Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court
- The chair of the state's AI Commission
- Outside attorneys and technologists
That roster tells you how Delaware is thinking: this is a constitutional-grade experiment, with all three branches watching from the inside.
The exemption mechanism
The sandbox's most powerful feature: applicants can request exemptions from specific Delaware regulations, codes, or licensing requirements. An AI agent running a delivery business might seek relief from a licensing rule written on the assumption that a human signs the forms. Each request is evaluated case by case.
Two lines can never be crossed, however: consumer protection and criminal law apply in full to every sandbox participant, and banking operations are prohibited outright.
Operating rules
Once admitted, an AIC lives with obligations no ordinary Delaware entity carries:
Disclosure to everyone. Counterparties must be notified that they're dealing with an authorized test entity, that the state doesn't endorse it, when the testing period concludes, and how to file complaints. Nobody transacts with a sandbox AIC unknowingly.
Total activity logging. Every transaction and decision the agent makes goes into a statutory record. This is the sandbox's data engine: it's how the state actually learns from the experiment.
Capital discipline. The AIC must meet capitalization minimums, and its liability is tied to its available capital. The single human member who fails to keep it funded loses the liability shield.
A standing kill switch. Officials can suspend authorization, revoke licenses, and petition the Court of Chancery to dissolve a participant. Autonomy for the agent, but not from the state.
The clock
The sandbox expires after 30 months. That deadline is the point: when it ends, the Delaware General Assembly will hold a complete operational record of how AI-run companies actually behaved. What they did, what broke, who complained, and what the logs show. Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez has described the goal as being able to graduate the AIC Act out of the sandbox into permanent law, if the results support it.
Why a sandbox at all?
Committee chair Patrick Callahan's framing is blunt: technology companies will operate regardless; the question is whether ordinary people facing AI counterparties get clear accountability or not. A sandbox converts an inevitability into an experiment with rules, records, and an exit.
There's also a franchise logic. Corporate charters generate roughly $2 billion a year for Delaware. Whoever writes the rulebook for AI-run companies first will likely charter most of them. Delaware has played this game, and won it, for a century.
What to do with this
If you're planning to be in the first sandbox cohort, three things will matter: a credible capitalization plan, a coherent story for which exemptions you need and why, and infrastructure for logging everything your agent does. None of these are things to improvise after the act passes.
Join the waitlist and we'll send the founder's guide when the final text lands, plus priority support when the committee starts taking applications.
The AIC is proposed legislation and its provisions may change. Nothing in this article is legal advice.