State Laws — Reversal
Colorado House Votes 57–6 to Gut Original AI Act
The Colorado House passes SB 26-189, repealing and replacing the landmark Colorado AI Act with a disclosure-only framework for “automated decision-making technology.” The Senate had already approved it 34–1 on May 7. The bill now heads to Governor Jared Polis, who is expected to sign — completing the rapid reversal of America’s first comprehensive AI regulation.
Colorado’s House of Representatives voted 57 to 6 on Saturday to pass SB 26-189, the legislation that formally repeals and replaces the Colorado Artificial Intelligence Act of 2024. The bill, which cleared the state Senate on a 34–1 vote two days earlier, now heads to Governor Jared Polis. Polis — who signed the original 2024 law only reluctantly, in a statement at the time expressing “reservations” about its scope — is widely expected to sign the replacement. With his signature, the United States will lose, less than three months before it was set to take effect on February 1, 2027, what had been billed as the first comprehensive state-level regulation of high-risk artificial intelligence systems anywhere in the country.
The text of SB 26-189, as enrolled, replaces nearly every operative provision of the original SB 24-205. The new framework abandons the law’s defining structural choices: the mandatory risk-management program that high-risk AI deployers were required to maintain, the annual impact assessment obligation that paralleled the EU AI Act’s Article 27, and — perhaps most consequentially — the self-reporting duty that required deployers to notify the state attorney general within ninety days of discovering algorithmic discrimination by their own systems. In place of that compliance architecture, SB 26-189 substitutes a narrower notice-and-rights model: covered entities deploying “automated decision-making technology” (the new statutory term of art, which replaces “high-risk AI system”) must disclose to consumers that an automated system is being used and must provide a mechanism for human review of adverse decisions. There is no rulemaking authority delegated to the attorney general comparable to the one in the original act, and the private right of action that civil-rights advocates had pushed for during the original 2024 negotiations is again absent.
The vote margin tells its own story. SB 24-205 passed the Colorado House in 2024 by 40 to 21, with significant Republican opposition and audible Democratic discomfort. SB 26-189 passed today by 57 to 6 — a coalition that crossed party lines almost completely and that lost only the votes of a small bloc of progressive Democrats who had been the original act’s loudest proponents. The political coalition that built the 2024 law has, in two legislative sessions, lost the floor. Industry groups that had lobbied against the original act — the Colorado Technology Association, the Chamber of Commerce’s state affiliate, and a cross-sector coalition of insurers, lenders, and healthcare providers organized as the Responsible Innovation Coalition — have spent the past eight months pressing for repeal or substantial narrowing. They got both.
The replacement framework is closer to the disclosure-and-notice statutes enacted earlier this year in Utah and Texas than it is to any of the comprehensive risk-management regimes that progressive states had been drafting in parallel. New York’s Frontier AI Act, California’s SB 1047 successor legislation, and Illinois’ pending HB 3563 all retain core elements — risk assessments, third-party audits, attorney-general rulemaking — that Colorado has now stripped from its own statute. The Colorado pivot has the practical effect of removing the most aggressive state-level regulatory template from the federalism conversation, leaving the most demanding US frameworks concentrated in three states that together represent perhaps a quarter of the national market but none of which has yet brought its own regime fully into force.
Governor Polis’ expected signature will leave the litigation landscape unchanged in form but profoundly altered in substance. The constitutional challenge filed against SB 24-205 by xAI in February — and joined by the US Department of Justice on April 24 — targeted the original act’s provisions on compelled disclosure and on Commerce Clause grounds. Those claims do not automatically dissolve when the underlying statute is repealed; courts can still address whether the original’s now-moot provisions inflicted compensable harm during the window they were nominally in effect. But the prospective relief sought by the plaintiffs has been overtaken by events, and the case’s practical posture going forward will be largely about attorneys’ fees and the federal-preemption arguments that the DOJ may now wish to redirect at the surviving disclosure-only framework.