November 21, 2025 01:26 PM UTC

Trump Wants To Pre-Empt Colorado's AI Laws By Fiat

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Grand Junction Sentinel’s Kalen McCain reports first locally, the Trump administration is preparing another boundary-pushing executive order that seeks to pre-empt Colorado law regulating the use of artificial intelligence in decision-making roles that could affect individual rights, opening yet another front in Donald Trump’s relentless expansion of presidential power and in the regulation of this novel and potentially far-reaching technology:

“Some States are even trying to embed DEI ideology into AI models, producing ‘Woke AI,’” the president wrote. “We MUST have one Federal Standard instead of a patchwork of 50 State Regulatory Regimes. If we don’t, then China will easily catch us in the AI race.”

Trump’s post did not specifically announce any impending executive action, instead calling on Congress to, “Put it in the NDAA, or pass a separate Bill.” But several national news outlets, including Politico and the Washington Post, reported the president was considering an executive order on the matter as early as today, based on anonymous tips from within the White House.

As the Washington Post reports, Trump’s executive order would direct the Justice Department to sue states like Colorado that have passed AI regulations on constitutional interstate commerce grounds, despite Congress not having passed any legislation addressing the issue federally. The order would also cut off federal broadband development funds to states with such laws on the books:

The draft AI order would direct the Justice Department to challenge state laws regulating the technology on the grounds that they interfere with interstate commerce. Travis Hall, state director for the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, said the approach appeared to be unconstitutional.

“Preemption is a question for Congress, which they have considered and rejected, and should continue to reject,” Hall said. “This proposal is shocking in its disregard for the democratic processes of state governments in their work to address the real and documented harms arising from AI tools.”

Here in Colorado, as the Sentinel reports, the prime House sponsor of Senate Bill 24-205 says this move is a blatant sellout to the techbro billionaires who have cozied up to Trump since his re-election last November:

“This Executive Order is a last-ditch effort to help Big Tech make more profits and ignore the problems they are causing with far-from-perfect AI,” State Rep. Briana Titone, a Democrat and sponsor of SB24-205, said in an email to The Sentinel Thursday morning. “This EO has no teeth to accomplish anything but to extort states into compliance through punishing rural Americans who need broadband. States should retain our rights to govern the way we see fit, especially in the absence of federal action on needed policy, and that is what Colorado intends to do.”

At the very least, this executive order will mean more litigation to defend state law that may itself be subject to change as the debate over implementing Colorado’s new AI regulations continues. However you feel about regulating artificial intelligence, there’s a good argument to be made that presidents shouldn’t be able to override laws passed by states without Congress first prescribing what that national policy should look like. Once we resolve that question, there’s only one way to make sure artificial intelligence operates in accordance with laws that apply to people. And that’s for people to make laws that ensure it happens.

The lesson, like on so many other issues, is that getting this right in our one little state only gets you so far.