DENVER — In advance of Colorado’s special session, state lawmakers, local leaders, and community allies gathered to announce the introduction of the Colorado Artificial Intelligence (AI) Sunshine Act. The Sunshine Act ensures consumer protections and creates thoughtful guardrails on Big Tech. This bill creates a streamlined framework for regulating emerging technology and cuts red tape for Colorado businesses and public agencies. It would also counteract efforts to pass the Big Tech Immunity Act, which would leave Coloradans vulnerable to abuse and discrimination by algorithmic systems.
“These systems deny opportunity, they inflate rents, they jack up the price of groceries and they deny families the medical care they need. The AI Sunshine Act is not the final word but it is an extremely important step,” said David Seligman, Towards Justice Executive Director. “When these systems are making critical decisions about whether you get a job, whether you get an apartment, whether you have access to medical care — you have a right to know what sort of factors those decisions are relying upon.”
Corporations increasingly use hidden algorithmic decision systems (ADSs) to determine who gets hired or promoted, how much tenants pay for rent, who receives medical care, and more. While ADSs can be powerful tools that streamline and support business operations, they can be unreliable and prone to errors and bias. Coloradans are experiencing real harm every day from the use of such systems, but they often do not know, much less have any recourse, when companies use ADSs to reject them using incorrect, biased, or illegally obtained information.
Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez, Representative Brianna Titone, Representative Javier Mabrey, House Assistant Majority Leader Jennifer Bacon, and Representative Manny Rutinel all spoke in support of the Sunshine Act at Wednesday’s joint press conference.
“This bill is a culmination of the feedback from two years of working on policy. We have stood by our values, of transparency and of disclosure, to help industry have trust in the system, and for consumers to have trust in the system,” said Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez, Senate District 32.
Representative Manny Rutinel, State House District 32 added, “This bill doesn't ban AI, it prevents secrecy. It says that transparency is important before a decision. Explanations are important after a decision. And a clear path to fix errors is also important. So that technology serves people, not the other way around.”
Current law, scheduled to go into effect in February 2026, includes crucial transparency and accountability protections for Coloradans subjected to decisions driven by hidden ADSs.
The 2025 AI Sunshine Act would preserve those core protections while simplifying the law and reducing obligations on Colorado businesses and public agencies. The Act will also realign incentives to encourage developers of ADS to work with deployers to proactively combat bias in their systems.
“Consumers want this. Poll after poll after poll. Consumers want us to do something on AI,” Representative Brianna Titone, State House District 27 said. “They are concerned, they are worried about it. It is something they want us to do.”
The Colorado AI Sunshine Act would implement bare minimum protections to protect Coloradans and ensure that corporations don’t continue to use these life-altering technologies in the dark. These protections include:
- Ensuring that Coloradans know when and how ADSs impact key decisions in their lives
- Allowing Coloradans to access and correct any inaccurate data used by hidden ADS to inform decisions about their lives.
- Requiring ADS developers to provide deployers with information about the risk that their ADS could lead to violations of Colorado’s civil rights and consumer protection laws.
- Ensuring that developers provide deployers with all the information they need to meet transparency obligations to consumers.
- Making developers jointly responsible with deployers when an ADS leads to a violation of existing law — unless the developer can demonstrate that the deployer misused the system.
As hidden ADSs increasingly impact Coloradans’ lives, there must be an opportunity to understand their role and ensure that existing laws can be brought to bear on these systems that, until now, have operated in a black box beyond public scrutiny.
“The bill simply says that if technology is going to be used to make major decisions about your life, you should know about it. We are in the year 2025 where technology is taking over these decisions and I’ll be damned if they can make discriminatory decisions and we can’t do nothing about it,” said House Assistant Majority Leader Jennifer Bacon, State House District 7.
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