Your phone gets a hands-free pass in Illinois. Your smart glasses won’t. The Illinois General Assembly has approved a bill updating the state’s distracted-driving law to ban AI smart glasses behind the wheel explicitly — and unlike existing phone rules, there are no Bluetooth exemptions, no exceptions for sitting in stopped traffic. None. If Governor JB Pritzker signs it, Illinois becomes the first U.S. state to draw that line, according to reporting from hi99.com covering the General Assembly vote.

Stricter Than Your Phone

The bill goes further than any existing distracted-driving statute in the country, stripping exemptions that still apply to cellphones.

• Bans AI smart glasses for drivers outright, with no hands-free or stopped-traffic exceptions — stricter than cellphone rules
• Covers all AI smart glasses broadly, whether they project AR displays or run voice-first assistants without visible graphics
• Sets fines starting around $75 for a first offense, escalating to roughly $150 for repeat violations
• Allows misdemeanor or felony charges if the use of smart glasses contributes to a serious crash
• Makes Illinois the only state to pass such a law — New York floated something similar, targeting head-mounted portable electronic devices, but the bill never reached a full chamber vote

A Bluetooth phone call through your car speakers is one thing. Navigation prompts, notifications, AI responses, and live recording all firing directly in a driver’s line of sight is something else entirely. Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias has positioned AI smart glasses as a fundamentally different class of distraction, arguing they “take a driver’s focus off the road” in ways a hands-free phone call simply doesn’t.

The practical scope of the ban becomes clear when examining current and forthcoming products. Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses already bundle hands-free photo and video capture, voice-controlled AI, and navigation features. Meta discourages driving use but doesn’t technically prevent it. Amazon is reportedly exploring smart glasses for delivery drivers that would overlay route information directly into the field of view — a development-stage project, not a released product. The bill was written to catch every iteration of that category.

A Test Case the Rest of the Country Is Watching

Illinois has a well-established track record of moving on emerging tech regulation before the rest of the country catches up.

For anyone tracking tech regulation, Illinois ‘ arrival first here fits an established pattern. This is the state that passed BIPA — the Biometric Information Privacy Act — which forced corporate policy overhauls nationwide around facial recognition and biometric data handling. It has two-party consent recording rules that already complicate smart glasses use in workplaces. Moving early on wearable tech is the pattern, not the exception.

If this law holds, manufacturers face the same fork in the road that phone makers hit a decade ago: build automatic driving-detection lockouts into hardware, or watch state-by-state bans chip away at one of the most practical selling points for smart glasses. The Google Glass backlash killed a product in bars and restaurants. This time, the regulatory immune response is coming for the car.