Democrats bring back AI civil rights bill

Senator Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, arrives for Senate votes at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, November 10, 2025. SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

On Tuesday morning, a cohort of Democratic lawmakers reintroduced the Artificial Intelligence Civil Rights Act, a bill that would establish protections for individual civil rights when someone’s personal data is processed by algorithms for a diverse range of consequential life decisions. 

Spearheaded by Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., along with Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Reps. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., and Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., the AI Civil Right Act’s comes as Markey asserts tech companies are lobbying to include a recently defeated moratorium on AI regulations at the state level in this year’s National Defense Authorization Act.  

The threat of states being unable to regulate how AI systems are leveraged in different, consequential fields sparked the lawmakers ...