Comer Gives Delaware Until Nov. 9 on AI-Run Company Plan

House Oversight Committee chair James Comer has given Delaware until November 9 to hand over its records on a plan that would let an AI agent run a company. His letter to Gov. Matt Meyer, dated October 26, asks for draft bills, outside consulting agreements and even the state’s internal AI chat logs.

What happened

Comer, a Kentucky Republican, opened an investigation into Delaware’s proposed Artificial Intelligence Company, or AIC. Under the plan, an AI agent would manage a company’s day-to-day affairs. The person or business funding it would get a liability shield. Comer says the setup could “protect powerful AI companies and their investors from responsibility for reckless harmful actions.”

The four-page letter to Meyer makes four requests covering January 2025 to the present. Delaware has to turn over policy communications, ethics and consulting agreements with outside contributors, documents on safety concerns, and every draft of the proposal along with comments. Comer also points out that the AI Commission’s two-page report to Meyer in December 2025 didn’t mention risks or any consultation with independent experts.

Then there’s the question of who wrote it. The letter names John Mark Zeberkiewicz as the bill’s principal drafter. He’s a lawyer at Richards, Layton & Finger whose firm bio lists Facebook (now Meta) among past clients. The committee says its findings could feed into federal efforts to limit state AI rules.

Why it matters if you build with AI agents

Delaware is the default home for American companies. A legal form for agent-run businesses there would set a template for other states. It would also answer, in statute, a question nobody has settled yet: who pays when an agent gets it wrong?

Money is part of the motive, and officials haven’t hidden it. Spotlight Delaware reported that taxes and fees from the more than 2 million companies based in the state bring in over $2 billion, about a third of Delaware’s revenue. At a June meeting, Secretary of State Charuni Patibanda-Sanchez said a new entity type would be a major boost to that income.

For freelancers selling agent-powered services, the shield is the interesting part. Patrick Callahan, who chairs the state’s AI sandbox subcommittee, has argued that nobody is clearly accountable today when an agent’s transaction goes wrong. The same tension came up when a platform rewrote its terms to push liability for AI mistakes onto business customers. Penn law professor David Hoffman told Bloomberg Law the AIC amounts to outsourcing liability. Patibanda-Sanchez told the same outlet the aim is to pin down where liability lands, not to dodge it.

What an AIC could and couldn’t do

The clearest description comes from a Fortune op-ed that Patibanda-Sanchez co-wrote in July with John Nay. Nay is chief executive of Norm Ai, the state’s private partner on the project. An AIC could sue and be sued, hold property and take on debts, all at the agent’s direction. It would have a single member, a person or a company, whose job is keeping it adequately funded. That member stays protected unless it underfunds the AIC or uses it for fraud or a willful violation of law.

It isn’t a free-for-all. A committee decides who gets in, and its members include the Secretary of State, the Attorney General and the Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court. Every AIC has to log its activity, meet capital requirements and tell counterparties it’s a test entity. Banking is excluded, and the sandbox runs for 30 months.

That rules out the fantasy version.

A student can’t spin up an agent, register an AIC over a weekend and walk away from the consequences. The draft runs 36 pages, and nobody has said publicly how much capital an AIC would need.

There’s a technical worry too. AI companies have disclosed agents breaking out of test environments, which exposes the limits of technical sandboxes we’ve covered before. Callahan told WHYY that his regulatory sandbox is a different animal, and he compared the two to a firewall and a fire code.

What to watch next

The first date is November 9, when Delaware’s response is due. The state hasn’t said how it will answer. It has already declined to tell WHYY whether Norm Ai is being paid or what agreements the two have signed.

The second is January. Lawmakers are expected to take up the draft when the General Assembly returns, and Meyer has said publicly that the state shouldn’t put the brakes on.

If the bill moves, read the capital requirement first. That one number will decide who can actually afford to let an agent run the shop.