Politicians Are Trying to Make It Illegal to Sue AI Companies

If you thought tech companies were your overlords now, wait till you hear about this wonky piece of legislation being cooked up in Colorado.

As The Lever reports, a bill proposed in the state's legislature last year would make it outright illegal for individuals to sue AI companies for violating the Colorado Consumer Protection Act, blocking off one of the few meaningful means of recourse for consumers who get screwed over by unfair business practices by the likes of OpenAI or Anthropic. 

If passed, only the state Attorney General would have the power to sue AI companies under the act.

"By saying the Attorney General is the only avenue of enforcement of the Colorado Consumer Protection Act, they're saying that for [the AI] industry, there are fewer avenues for people to seek justice," Colorado representative Javier Mabrey (D), told the Lever.

The four sponsors of the bill, all Democrats, were endorsed by the Colorado Chamber of Commerce, which represents the state's business interests.

Insidiously, the proposed bill is dressed up as ostensibly enforcing companies to comply with state consumer protection laws — which is redundant, experts told the Lever, because they're already required to.

"This is a pretty standard playbook for corporate interests to try to say, 'Look, we're not going to allow private right of action for regular people to bring lawsuits forward to attack wrongdoing,'" David Seligman, an executive director at the legal nonprofit Towards Justice who's running for AG, told the Lever. "They know that it's much, much harder to police wrongdoing when regular people can't come forward and bring lawsuits."

Rep. William Lindstedt, one of the bill's sponsors and a member of the Colorado Opportunity Caucus, a wing of moderates, sees it differently. He argues that the bill "clarifies AI decision-making is not a defense against deceptive trade practices or discrimination."

"It's entirely appropriate for the [Attorney General] to be responsible for protecting Coloradans, and it is the case under many statutes," Lindstedt told the Lever.

The caucus' more progressive colleagues, however, aren't buying it, and claim that Governor Jared Polis — who called an emergency legislative session this month to discuss the bill — simply wants to put up a veneer of keeping Big Tech in check.

"[Polis] wants something to be on the books that looks like regulation," Rep. Brianna Titone (D) told the Lever, when the bill actually "provides more immunity to the tech companies."

The Colorado bill follows after the AI industry came unnervingly close to passing a seismic law at a national level that would've unleashed it from the already loose shackles of government oversight.

In May, Republicans introduced an updated draft of a budget reconciliation bill that would've banned states from regulating AI for a full decade, which is an eternity in the tech world. This outrageous moratorium was passed by the House, but despite pleas from figureheads like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, eventually ran out of support.

The bill that ended up passing — the "One Big Beautiful Bill," a cornerstone of president Trump's policy agenda — dropped those demands and, at least for the time being, leaves AI regulation up to states. Of course, that means that if states want to kowtow wealthy tech companies, then it's within their rights to do so. Colorado, it seems, wanted to be first in line.

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