On May 17, Colorado passed comprehensive AI legislation. Learn more about the consumer protections in this bill, and what it means for developers and deployers of AI systems
Lauren Diethelm
AI Content Marketing Specialist
May 24, 2024
On May 20, 2024, the Colorado state legislature announced that the governor had signed Colorado’s comprehensive AI act into law on May 17. The “Concerning Consumer Protections in Interactions with Artificial Intelligence Systems,” also called to Colorado AI Act (CAIA), is the first comprehensive and risk-based approach to AI in the US.
Set to take effect on February 1, 2026, the CAIA aims to protect Colorado consumers from algorithmic discrimination and ensure transparency and accountability from developers and deployers of AI systems.
The CAIA defines an AI system as “any machine-based system that, for any explicit or implicit objective, infers from the inputs the system receives how to generate outputs, including content, decisions, predictions, or recommendations, that can influence physical or virtual environments.” Although the phrasing differs, this definition is similar to how the Utah AI bill defines AI.
A few other key definitions to understand in the CAIA include:
Algorithmic discrimination: Any condition in which the use of the AI system results in an unlawful differential treatment or impact on an individual or group of individuals that’s protected under state or federal laws
Consequential decision: Any decision that has material or similarly significant effect on the provision or denial to any consumer in areas like employment, education, financial services, and health care and housing
The Colorado AI Act focuses largely on high-risk AI systems, which it defines as any AI system that makes, or is a substantial factor in making, a consequential decision.
This definition of high-risk system differs from that of the EU AI Act, which focuses more specifically on identifying systems that have a significant harmful impact on health, safety, and fundamental rights. The CAIA definition of a high-risk system does not include:
An AI system that’s intended to perform a narrow procedural task; or
Detect decision-making patterns or deviations from prior decision-making patterns and is not intended to replace or influence a previously completed human assessment
The CAIA requires a developer or deployer of a high-risk AI system to use reasonable care to avoid algorithmic discrimination in the system.
Once the bill is in effect, a deployer or developer of a high-risk system will have unique requirements to ensure that consumers are protected from potential discrimination, and that there’s sufficient transparency and accountability in the model.
Under this bill, developers much maintain specific documentation, including a policy to comply with federal and state copyright laws, as well as a detailed summary of the content that was used to train the model.
Developers must also create, implement, maintain, and make documentation available to deployers who want to use the AI system. This documentation needs to:
Disclose a general statement regarding the reasonably foreseeable uses and known harmful or inappropriate uses of the system
Share information about the type of data used to train the system
State the purpose, intended benefits, and use of the high-risk system
Developers also are required to provide documentation explaining how the system was tested and evaluated for performance and mitigation before it was made available to the deployer.
Deployers, who use a high-risk AI system, will be required to use reasonable care to protect consumers from any known or potential risks of using AI. The CAIA requires deployers to:
Implement a risk management policy and program that is iteratively planned, implemented, and then regularly reviewed and updated
Complete impact assessments for deployed high-risk AI systems at least annually, and within 90 days of any intentional and substantial modification to the system
Notify the state attorney general where a high-risk system has caused or is likely to have caused algorithmic discrimination within 90 days or discovery
Deployers have additional requirements designed to increase transparency around AI and ensure that consumers interacting with it are protected.
They must provide consumers with the opportunity to correct any personal data that the AI system uses to make any consequential decisions, and must provide the opportunity to appeal any adverse consequential decisions resulting from that system.
Developers and deployers are also required to disclose to consumers when they’re interacting with AI, and must provide information on how to opt out of the processing of their personal data – a requirement that mirrors transparency requirements in other state privacy laws as well as Utah’s AI bill.
Like the Utah AI bill, the CAIA continues the growing trend of state-level initiatives that are filling the void left by the absence of federal legislation regulating AI. However, unlike Utah, which focuses more on establishing working groups and commercial communications using generative AI, the CAIA takes a more comprehensive and risk-based approach to AI regulation.
As the map of comprehensive state AI legislation continues to fill out, it will become more important for organizations to choose which frameworks they want to align their AI governance operations to, and to proactively communicate those values to the rest of their workforce.
To learn more about how aligning to key frameworks early on can help steer your AI governance program, see which frameworks OneTrust’s AI governance committee chose and how we integrated that guidance in our own program.
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