DOJ Seeks to Block Colorado AI Anti-Discrimination Law

The DOJ filed a "Complaint in Intervention" for declaratory injunctive relief to prevent Colorado Attorney General Philip Weiser from enforcing a state law which imposes a duty on AI developers to take reasonable care to avoid algorithmic discrimination.

The Colorado law, known as the "Consumer Protections for Artificial Intelligence Act," was signed in 2024, and was set to take effect June 30, 2026, before the state Attorney General reportedly agreed to suspend the deadline. 

In the Complaint, filed in the US District Court for the District of Colorado, the federal government explained that the law requires AI developers and deployers to prevent "algorithmic discrimination" - defined as differential treatment based on race, sex, religion, disability, and other protected characteristics - in consequential decisions involving employment, education, housing, healthcare, financial services, insurance, and legal services. The law exempts AI used to "increase diversity" or "redress historical discrimination" from its definition of prohibited conduct.

The DOJ argued the law violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment by (i) requiring developers to eliminate statistical output disparities, which, they argue, effectively compels demographic-based engineering of AI models and thus constitutes the very discrimination it purports to prevent; and (ii)  through the law's diversity exemption, creating an unconstitutional double standard, as there is no documented history of past intentional discrimination by Colorado or the AI industry that would justify race-conscious carve-outs under strict or intermediate scrutiny. Further, the DOJ argued that embedding state-mandated demographic balancing requirements into AI systems threatens U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence.

The DOJ asked the court to declare the law unconstitutional and permanently enjoin its enforcement.