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Newsletter — Issue 3 — April 27, 2026
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This newsletter has been published by Engage Colorado
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The Ask of Attorney General Phil Weiser on the xAI Lawsuit Against the Colorado AI Act
Show His Commitment to Colorado and His Ability to Lead with Strength
This Call to Action Extends to Governor Polis, Senator Bennet, Senator Hickenlooper, and Mayor Johnston
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On April 24, the U.S. Department of Justice joined Elon Musk's xAI in suing the State of Colorado to block the Colorado Artificial Intelligence Act from taking effect on June 30. The filing marks the first DOJ intervention in a state AI law case. The case is captioned X.AI LLC v. Weiser — Attorney General Phil Weiser is the named defendant by virtue of the office he holds. As a candidate for Governor, Phil now has his clearest opportunity to show Colorado two things that matter: his commitment to the state's innovation economy, and his ability to lead with strength when the easy path is delay.
Phil's response to our Open Letter, Ensuring Colorado's Innovation Future — sent this month by a bipartisan coalition of more than 340 Colorado tech and business leaders to Governor Polis, Senator Bennet, Senator Hickenlooper, Attorney General Weiser, and Mayor Johnston — was: "Thank you for your recent letter setting out your concerns about the inflection point Colorado finds itself in and your offer of help. On this, I am all in, and I am committed to the nine points you raise."
The Colorado AI Act, as Phil knows, has played an outsized role in the perception shift that has moved Colorado — in the eyes of founders, investors, and capital allocators — from one of the country's most respected tech ecosystem geographies to a geography to be avoided. As such, if Phil is all in on his commitment to the nine points we raised, he will use his position as AG to lead the effort to repeal the Colorado AI Act.
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Three Specific Actions
What "All In" Looks Like
To demonstrate he is all in, Phil can take three specific actions to lead that effort. The first is by far the most consequential.
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Action 1
Pursue a consent decree in X.AI v. Weiser that effectively repeals the AI Act.
With DOJ now a party to the case, Phil has the counterparty he needs to negotiate a settlement that does far more than narrow the statute. We need him to use this opportunity to enter into a consent decree — a federal court order that permanently enjoins Colorado from enforcing SB24-205, or stipulates the statute is unconstitutional and unenforceable, functionally equivalent to repeal. The statute remains on the books only as a formal matter; every operative provision becomes a dead letter; and the court order binds every future Attorney General regardless of what they might prefer. The General Assembly retains authority to enact a better statute in its place — but the existing AI Act, the actual source of the damage to Colorado's reputation, would be over. Pursuing this is what "all in" looks like. Anything less falls short of the commitment Phil made in writing.
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Action 2
In parallel, issue a formal Attorney General opinion on the constitutional questions SB24-205 raises.
A published AG opinion identifying which provisions raise serious First Amendment, Dormant Commerce Clause, and vagueness concerns — and laying out the office's analysis of each — would do three durable things: create a public legal record that informs how Colorado and federal courts read the statute; give the General Assembly an AG-endorsed roadmap for the formal repeal that follows the consent decree; and provide a clear public explanation of why the decree was the right path. An AG opinion does not depend on who holds the office next, and it makes the legal reasoning underlying Action 1 transparent to Coloradans. Done alongside Action 1, it strengthens the case for both.
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Action 3
Use the bully pulpit of the Attorney General's office and his candidacy for Governor to make the public case.
Beyond legal action, we need Phil to use both platforms available to him — the AG's office today and his campaign for Governor — to make the case directly to Coloradans: why the AI Act has damaged the state's innovation economy, why repealing it is necessary, and — critically — why the AI Act as enacted is not the vehicle, even with amendments, to address the legitimate concerns about AI safety and consumer protection. The structural defects of SB24-205 — vague operative terms left to AG rulemaking, extraterritorial reach, disproportionate burden on small developers, viewpoint-implicating disclosure mandates — cannot be patched into a workable framework. What Colorado needs is a new framework, built in good faith with industry, civil-rights advocates, and AI safety researchers. Phil has the platform, the credibility, and the legal expertise to make that case as no one else in Colorado government can. And he should commit, on the campaign trail, to leading the creation of a more appropriate replacement bill as Governor — one that protects Coloradans from real algorithmic harms without imposing the structural burdens that have made SB24-205 a lightning rod for why Colorado is being categorized as a geography to avoid.
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The Stakes
Why Anything Less Falls Short
(a) The decisive action sends a strong positive signal. Pursuing the consent decree, issuing the AG opinion, and championing the public case together signal — to capital deployers, founders, and senior tech talent — that Colorado is committed to being, in the language of the Open Letter, "a preferred geography for technology investment, company formation, business expansion, and long-term capital deployment." Every other path sends the opposite signal: that Colorado's senior elected officials are willing to live with the perception that has driven Palantir, dozens of other companies, and billions in capital allocation to other states.
(b) Fighting the xAI lawsuit — or letting it sit unresolved — signals the opposite. A federal court fight that drags through Phil's remaining nine months, into the next AG's tenure, and possibly to the Supreme Court means a multi-year period during which Colorado is publicly identified as the state defending the most restrictive AI regulation in the country — the worst possible advertisement for Colorado as an AI destination. The Open Letter warned exactly this: regions that "hesitate, fragment, or send conflicting signals do not simply slow — they lose ground in ways that compound over time."
(c) Delaying implementation hands the problem to — and empowers — the next AG. Delay was the path Colorado's political leadership chose in 2025 and again in 2026, and it has not solved the problem; it has perpetuated it. After January 2027, Phil will have no control over how SB24-205 is interpreted, enforced, or shaped through rulemaking by his successor. Whoever wins the November AG election will inherit the statute as Phil leaves it — and their enforcement priorities are not within Phil's control. Delay without resolution means handing the next AG a statute they can use however they choose. The damage Phil leaves behind will be compounded, not reduced.
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Broader Call to Action
To Governor Polis, Senators Bennet and Hickenlooper, and Mayor Johnston
The Open Letter was addressed to five Colorado leaders by name. Phil — as AG and the named defendant in X.AI v. Weiser — carries the heaviest specific obligation. But the other four — Governor Polis, Senator Bennet, Senator Hickenlooper, and Mayor Johnston — each have their own platforms and their own role to play. Each of them should now:
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Use their bully pulpits to explain why repeal of the Colorado AI Act is necessary — not as a partisan position, but as the economic and reputational reset the Ensuring Colorado's Innovation Future letter calls for.
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Call publicly on Phil to take the three actions outlined above — pursue the consent decree, issue the AG opinion, make the public case. A sitting Governor calling on his sitting Attorney General to act is not interference; it is leadership.
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Offer Phil their full and visible support in taking those actions. Phil cannot afford to be alone on this. A unified front from Polis, Bennet, Hickenlooper, and Johnston changes the political calculation considerably; silence makes Phil's job harder.
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Specific Leadership
The Call to Action Extends to Governor Polis and Senator Bennet
Of the four, Governor Polis carries the most direct responsibility. He signed SB24-205 over the technology community's objections, he didn't support the repeal of the bill when this was proposed by Colorado's tech leaders, and he convened the working group whose March 2026 framework remains on the table. He has already endorsed the Open Letter. To show he too is all in with the recommendations, he should unequivocally endorse the three actions and call on his Attorney General to take them.
Senator Bennet, currently the leading candidate for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, has both the platform of a sitting U.S. Senator and the heightened public visibility of a top-tier statewide candidate — and the most direct stake of anyone besides Phil in showing Colorado where he stands on this question. He co-signed the May 2025 letter asking the legislature to delay the AI Act's implementation. He has publicly acknowledged the law is problematic. To show he too is all in with the recommendations, he should endorse the three actions, call publicly on Phil to take them, and commit to leading the creation of a more appropriate replacement bill if elected Governor.
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A Final Qualifier
I am not a politician or an attorney. Some of the specific details associated with these recommendations — the precise structure of a consent decree, the exact formulation of an AG opinion, the legislative language of a replacement bill — will need to be refined by people who do that work for a living. The important point is that the Colorado AI Act needs to be effectively repealed. An effective repeal is the first big step Colorado can take to demonstrate that it is committed to being, in the Open Letter's own language, "the premier technology and innovation ecosystem between the coasts." Phil has the platform and the opportunity to lead that step. So do Governor Polis and Senator Bennet — both candidates to be Colorado's next Governor and both already on record about the AI Act's defects. So do Senator Hickenlooper and Mayor Johnston.
We hope all five will show the leadership we need at this critical time for Colorado's innovation ecosystem.
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