This April, the US Department of Justice joined Elon Musk’s xAI in suing the state of Colorado to kill its AI anti-discrimination law.

When the federal government sides with a billionaire against a state trying to protect its residents from AI discrimination, that’s not only a Colorado story. That’s everyone’s story.

The justice department’s lawsuit is part of a coordinated federal effort to reframe AI consumer protections as ideological overreach. In July 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order on “preventing woke AI”, equating bias mitigation measures to a leftist “woke” agenda that suppresses free speech and truth. The federal National Policy Framework launched in March included a push to pre-empt state laws on AI, with Colorado’s law targeted. The justice department’s intervention in Colorado marks the first time the federal government has sought to intervene in a lawsuit challenging a state AI law.

The AI bill in reference, Senate Bill 205, was about protecting people from discrimination in high-risk AI systems making consequential decisions: who gets hired, who gets housing, who receives healthcare.

The original bill required bias audits, impact assessments and disclosure, requirements that drew pushback from the business community. Colorado heard that and responded. Before xAI ever filed its lawsuit, the state revised those requirements with a reduced transparency framework in mid-March.

This kind of bill matters. A 2019 study published in Science found that a widely used healthcare algorithm deployed across US hospitals assigned Black patients half the care of equally sick white patients because it used healthcare costs as a proxy for health needs, embedding existing inequities into clinical decisions.........

© The Guardian