Justice Department Joins xAI Lawsuit Against Colorado Law

The Justice Department joined xAI’s civil lawsuit on April 24 that challenged an artificial intelligence (AI) law in Colorado, set to go into effect on June 30.

The lawsuit, initially filed by Elon Musk’s company xAI on April 9, claimed the state law will cause unconstitutional “algorithmic discrimination” and asked a court to block it from being enforced.

The DOJ sided with xAI, arguing the law “jeopardizes the United States’ position as the global AI leader by requiring AI systems to incorporate discriminatory ideology that prioritizes preferred demographic characteristics and outcomes over accurate and merit-based outputs.”

“Laws that require AI companies to infect their products with woke DEI ideology are illegal,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who works under the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

“The Justice Department will not stand on the sidelines while states such as Colorado coerce our nation’s technological innovators into producing harmful products that advance a radical, far-left worldview at odds with the Constitution.”

This is the first time the DOJ has stepped into a case that challenged AI on a state level.

Governor Jared Polis (D-Colo.) signed into law “Consumer Protections for Artificial Intelligence” in May 2024 with hopes that it would regulate AI “developers” and “deployers” to prevent “algorithmic discrimination.”

But after the signing, Polis and other lawmakers who represent the state asked the General Assembly to “delay implementation of SB 24-205 until January 2027” so that stakeholders could craft a solution that does not “stifl[e] innovation or driv[e] business away from our state.”

The legislation has not yet been revised. It was delayed until June 30, 2026.

In the initial complaint filed earlier this month, xAI said it built Grok—an AI assistant—“to answer to only evidence and reason, without regard to political correctness, ideological biases, or anything that might distort objective truth.”

But it alleged the State of Colorado “seeks to force xAI to abandon its disinterested pursuit of truth and instead promote the State’s ideological views on various matters, racial justice in particular.”

The company accused the Colorado law of having provisions that “prohibit developers of AI systems from producing speech that the State of Colorado dislikes.”

The Epoch Times contacted Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser and Polis for comment.

The Trump administration has embraced the use of AI models in the rapidly growing tech sector since the president entered the White House for his second term.

In September 2025, the Trump administration revealed it would make Musk’s Grok chatbot available for federal agencies to use over the course of 18 months.