Consumer Reports, along with a broad group of national and Colorado-based public interest organizations, sent a letter to Colorado legislators and Colorado’s AI Task Force focused on which provisions of the state’s new AI law must be retained, and changes policymakers should make to ensure the law is sound. The letter, linked above, was covered by Colorado Public Radio.
Colorado’s first-in-the-nation AI law focuses on companies’ use of AI to make high-stakes decisions about consumers, such as access to employment, housing, insurance, financial services, and more. When the law was passed earlier this year, CR called for it to be strengthened before it goes into effect in 2026.
This fall a group of organizations focused on labor issues, consumer protection, civil rights, privacy, and more, worked together to articulate which parts of the law must be protected, and which provisions should be amended.
Signatories include Colorado-based groups such as ACLU of Colorado, AFT-Colorado, Colorado AFL-CIO, Colorado Fiscal Institute, Teamsters Local 455, and Towards Justice. National groups also signed on, including American Association of People with Disabilities, Center for American Progress, Center for Democracy & Technology, Consumer Federation of America, Electronic Privacy Information Center, and Tech Equity Action.
Colorado Senate Bill 24-205 represents a welcome step toward much-needed transparency and accountability for high-risk AI systems, the groups said. However, more is needed to protect Colorado’s consumers and workers.
We urged policymakers to retain the bill’s strongest existing provisions, including:
- Broad definition of covered systems, making it harder for companies to evade the law;
- Notice to consumers subjected to AI-driven decisions about the use and purpose of the system;
- Impact assessments that test AI decision systems for discrimination risks and document the AI decision system’s purpose, intended uses, data used and produced, performance, and post-deployment monitoring;
- A right to an explanation of the principal reasons behind decisions and a right to appeal such decisions to a human decision-maker; and
- Giving the Attorney General authority to issue rules interpreting and clarifying the law.
Policymakers should also strengthen the law and further protect Coloradans by:
- Building on existing civil rights protections by prohibiting the sale or use of discriminatory AI decision systems;
- Expanding the law’s transparency provisions so that consumers understand why companies are using AI decision systems and what and how these tools measure, including requiring explanations to be actionable;
- Strengthening impact assessment provisions to require companies to test AI decision systems for validity and the risk that they violate consumer protection, labor, civil rights, and other laws;
- Eliminating the many loopholes that exclude numerous consumers, workers, and companies from the law’s protections and obligations, as well as unnecessary and overbroad rebuttable presumptions and affirmative defenses that allow companies to escape accountability; and
- Strengthening enforcement by giving consumers and local district attorneys the right to seek redress in court when companies fail to comply with the law.
CR has also undertaken nationally-representative surveys of consumers on the use of AI in high-stakes decisions and has conducted research on compliance with New York City’s AI bias and transparency law.