Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin on March 24 vetoed House Bill 2094, the “High-Risk Artificial Intelligence Developer and Deployer Act.” The veto can only be overridden by a two-thirds vote of the House, which seems unlikely given the close vote in the House on the Senate substitute (52-Y; 46-N).
In his Veto Explanation, Gov. Youngkin noted there are already “many laws currently in place that protect consumers and place responsibilities on companies relating to discriminatory practices, privacy, data use, libel, and more.”
In conclusion, he stated:
The role of government in safeguarding AI practices should be one that enables and empowers innovators to create and grow, not one that stifles progress and places onerous burdens on our Commonwealth’s many business owners. This bill would harm the creation of new jobs, the attraction of new business investment, and the availability of innovative technology in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
The Virginia legislation is similar Colorado’s Senate Bill 24-205 that was signed into law on May 17, 2024, and goes into effect Feb. 1, 2026. The Colorado act was the first of its kind, but was signed by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis with reservations, encouraging “the legislature to reexamine this concept as the law is finalized before it takes effect in 2026.”
In fact, just one month before the Virginia veto, the Colorado Artificial Intelligence Impact Task Force issued a report that identified numerous issues with Colorado’s law, including:
- decisions that qualify as “consequential decisions”
- exemptions to the definition of covered decision systems
- information and documentation that developers provide deployers
- timing of and triggering events for impact assessments
- definition of algorithmic discrimination
- definition of “substantial factor”
- definition and mechanics of developers’ and deployers’ “duty of care”
Colorado-like AI legislation has been introduced in numerous other states, as well as legislation to form task groups to study a balanced approach to AI governance. Perhaps the latter will prevail if legislators recognize that hastily enacted laws are seldom without faults, and that for now there are existing state laws that prohibit discriminatory practices, as noted by Gov. Youngkin and attorneys general in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Oregon.
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