Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon announced a major win for American artificial intelligence (AI) dominance after her department intervened in a lawsuit challenging a new Colorado law that prohibits “algorithmic discrimination” during an interview on Breitbart News Saturday.
Speaking with Breitbart News political editor Bradley Jaye, Dhillon revealed details on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) recent success at getting the state of Colorado to agree not to enforce SB24-205, which requires AI developers and deployers to satisfy certain disclosure, reporting, and prevention requirements when creating algorithm products designed for services like mortgage lending, student admissions, and job-candidate selection.
The bill’s text included an explicit carveout for discriminatory algorithms designed to advance “diversity” or “redress historic discrimination,” and AI company xAI filed a lawsuit against the statute on April 9, alleging it is unconstitutional.
Marking the first time that the DOJ has intervened in a case challenging state regulations on AI, Dhillon’s team joined the case on behalf of xAI on Friday. Together, they argued that “embedding AI with state-mandated discrimination is a recipe for disaster.”
Emphasizing that the Civil Rights Division at the DOJ is meant to “protect American citizens, and even American companies, from discrimination on the basis of impermissible racial, gender, et cetera criteria,” Dhillon told Jaye that Colorado had attempted to require companies and municipalities to “look at outcomes and then racially balance and adjust their algorithms to produce outcomes that reflect the demographic population.”
“This is not required by law. In fact, it’s prohibited by federal law,” she stated. “And you know, worse, the statute actually carved out if people or companies are doing discrimination to remedy past discrimination, that’s okay. All of this is just nonsense, and it stifles innovation, and it’s illegal under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
In addition to violating the Fourteenth Amendment, Dhillon noted that xAI also has First Amendment arguments against the bill, “because, effectively, the state is compelling it to utter certain speech in furtherance of these DEI goals.”
“We’re not arguing that because the government doesn’t have that obligation, but we’re stepping in to protect American citizens and American companies,” she explained, before revealing the success of her efforts on Friday.
“We had a great result yesterday,” Dhillon announced, recounting how Colorado “agreed to not enforce the law against xAI” within just a couple of hours of the DOJ intervening.
“And by the evening, before we went to bed, we had Colorado agree to not enforce it against anybody until they send it back to the legislature to fix it,” she explained. “So it’s pretty much a total win for American consumers and companies, and the first instance of the United States Department of Justice stepping in on an AI case to really protect this innovation and protect Americans from discrimination by AI algorithmic manipulation.”
Highlighting why civil rights work should be “important” to people on the right side of the political aisle, Dhillon told Jaye that conservatives “have come to look at civil rights as something that’s been weaponized against Americans, but civil rights are for all Americans.”
“So what we’re doing in the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division is exactly that — we’re standing up for all Americans, like in this xAI case.”
Directing her attention to fans of Breitbart News Saturday, Dhillon said, “If anyone here listening is a lawyer, and particularly if they’re an experienced lawyer, but even if they’re a brand-new lawyer, we’re hiring at the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.”
“And if civil rights isn’t your thing, I can tell you that we’re hiring in U.S. Attorney’s offices, Civil Division, Environmental Division, the Antitrust Division — everybody’s hiring at DOJ,” she continued. “It’s an opportunity to serve your country and then go back to private practice with some great new skills.”
“We need fewer conservative lawyers who just want to play defense, and more of us who have the creativity to go on offense,” Dhillon later added. “This xAI case is a great example of me opening up the news, seeing that something is happening that I can do something about, and going after it. And that’s like a different mentality than many conservative lawyers, [who] are just sort of hired to defend things.”
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. Eastern.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.